http://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardlawler/2012/11/08/an-idiots-guide-to-employee-engagement/

An Idiot's Guide to Employee Engagement

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Surveys measuring employee engagement have become increasingly common. Most major corporations now regularly survey their workforces. There is no doubt that their surveys can yield useful information about employee attitudes and behavior. In many cases, however, the data are misinterpreted, misunderstood, and result in wasted time and money.
Most engagement surveys ask questions concerning a number of distinctly different attitudes that employees hold. Some of these attitudes affect turnover, some affect work performance, and still others have little or no impact on employee behavior.
Many individuals who interpret the data have limited knowledge about what the causes and consequences are of employee motivation, satisfaction, commitment, and involvement. As a result, they don’t correctly interpret the data collected in engagement surveys.
This doesn’t have to be. We have decades of research on employee attitudes that clearly establishes the relationship among employee attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. Let me quickly review this research by starting with two common beliefs that are incorrect and then discussing three research findings that should be kept in mind when employee engagement data are interpreted.

Fallacy #1: Money does not motivate – it is only a “hygiene” factor.
For decades the discussion of whether or not money motivates behavior and how it motivates behavior has been prominent in the organizational behavior literature as well as in the mass media.  Writers have gained book sales and visibility by saying that it does not motivate performance (note the popularity of the recent book, Drive), and that it is only a “hygiene” or dissatisfier factor. The simple fact of the matter is that for many people, it does motivate performance. Study after study has shown that when significant amounts of money are clearly tied to specific behaviors, those behaviors are more likely to occur.

Fallacy #2: A happy worker is a productive worker.
Starting about the middle of the 20th century and proceeding for several decades, organizational psychologists conducted many studies that correlated job satisfaction with performance. The results consistently showed low or no correlation between the two. In some cases, there was low correlation only because performing well made employees more satisfied, not because employees worked harder because they were satisfied. This is a particularly important point when engagement data are interpreted. As we will see next, there are reasons to worry about employee job satisfaction, but not because of the impact of increasing satisfaction on performance!

Truth #1: People differ in what they value.
There are large differences in what people value. In order to understand how to motivate somebody, it is critical to know what an individual values. There are a number of indicators of what a person values. Perhaps the best one is watching the choices individuals make when they have the opportunity to choose a reward, say receive a raise, a promotion, or a day off. It is also possible to get a reasonable understanding of what they value by looking at their characteristics. Yes, age is a predictor, as is gender, but overall they are relatively poor predictors.
Often the best way to find out what people value is to ask them. Usually, they are pretty good reporters of what they value. However, sometimes they don’t have a high level of self-awareness, or they may feel that it is necessary to give a politically correct response. This brings me back to the original point that watching the choices they make is oftentimes the best indicator.
One last point: it is critical to avoid stereotyping and assuming that people of the same race, age, and gender are similar in what they value. Even within what appears to be relatively homogeneous groups, there are often enormous differences in what individuals value.

Truth #2: Expectations lead to motivation.
Motivation is best understood, influenced, and predicted by understanding the expectations that people have. Simply stated, people engage in behaviors that they expect will lead to rewards they value. Thus, it is critical to know individuals’ expectations of what their behaviors will lead to.
There are a variety of outcomes that may be tied to work behaviors. High performance may lead to more money, feelings of accomplishment, high job security, and a host of other positive outcomes that can cause people to perform at a high level. The key from an organizational point of view is to understand what people see as the consequences of different kinds behaviors and to create a good alignment between what the organization needs and what individuals expect to be rewarded for.
Often, simply setting goals for individuals can make a major impact on their motivation. If individuals accept the goals and see the behavior as worthwhile, they will be highly motivated to pursue these goals.

Truth #3: Satisfaction leads to membership, not performance.
Satisfaction is a good predictor of absenteeism and turnover. Earlier, the point was made that happy workers are not necessarily productive workers. On the other hand, they are likely to be individuals who will stay with an organization. Essentially, when employees say they are satisfied with their job, they are indicating that there is no reason for them to look elsewhere for an alternative situation. They are not necessarily saying that they are motivated to be productive, but they may be saying that they will be loyal to the company and speak well of it to others. This is different from them being motivated to perform well. Indeed, happy workers tend to RIP (retire in position) unless they are somehow motivated to perform at a high level.
Looking at the results of employee engagement surveys and developing action plans based on them requires looking at the items on the survey in terms of what they measure. Do they measure satisfaction? Do they measure motivation? Once this is done, and only once it is done, does it make sense to think about action items such as making work more interesting, providing more job security, or rewarding performance with bonus plans?
Yes, engagement scores are indicators of how good or bad a work situation is. In most cases, it is better to have higher rather than lower engagement scores, but in order to take action directed towards improving organizational performance, the items need to be looked at separately and used to make data-based changes that will drive employee retention, performance, and commitment.

How to Boost Employee Career Satisfaction

Employees need to be happy in their work. If they don’t feel fulfilled and enjoy some sense of autonomy, absenteeism and other ills will follow.

Happy brains are creative brains. That’s one conclusion from psychiatrist and attention deficit disorder expert Edward Hallowell’s book Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best From Your People.

Happiness should be a big aspiration in talent management due to its impact on productivity, creativity and loyalty. Since 2008, people are often producing within a pressure cooker of deadlines and an avalanche of information. Yet many high-potential, high-growth career tracks offer less time and fewer resources to draw out an employee’s best.

The executive parts of the brain, the frontal lobes, which excel at sequencing tasks, solving problems and producing results, are not online when people are under excessive stress. Further, prolonged stress ultimately triggers the fight or flight emotional parts of the brain, the limbic system, that make people feel and react, but not do, according to Hallowell. Instead of happy brains, people have stressed brains and low career satisfaction, which translates to low productivity and decreased innovative thinking.

In the 2012 National Norms Survey on employee engagement levels in the U.S. workforce, only 10 percent of the 700 adults surveyed in March agreed that they were fully engaged in their work. Modern Survey, an information gatherer and human capital trend analyst which conducts the annual workforce survey, reported that 67 percent of respondents were either underengaged or disengaged.

There were two things survey respondents claimed they wanted more than anything — senior leadership’s clear vision of where the organization is going and the opportunity to personally grow and develop. When connecting these desires to research like Hallowell’s on happiness at work, talent managers can find at least nine ways to boost career satisfaction in any organization.

A Clear Vision
Employees want to be informed about goals and expectations and how their roles fit within them. Do I have a future here? is one of the most important questions for both employers and employees to answer. Employers, however, often try to answer that question by offeringpromotions and pay raises when employees are really looking for value and meaning in their work.

In Shine, Hallowell contends that the first step to career satisfaction and high performance is to select the right people for the right jobs. This is a strengths-based approach to talent management as opposed to a performance-based approach that focuses on weaknesses and making improvements.

If people are engaged in work that leverages their natural strengths and interests, it fires up their brains. Talent managers can identify natural strengths and interests by talking to employees about what they love best about their jobs and the areas where they feel most accomplished. By giving people tasks that require more of those strengths and interests, managers can leverage more focused hours from employees than if they have placed people in roles that don’t fit their strengths and interests well.

Career satisfaction rule No. 1: Place people in the right roles according to strengths, skills and interests. Not everyone is destined to be a manager. Leaders and managers must have conversations with employees more than just annually about what they love about their work and what doesn’t suit them. These conversations should be ongoing. They also must be two-sided. Employees need to be aware of the organization’s goals and how their skills and aspirations fit within them. Without that knowledge it will be tougher for employees to find a fit.

Rule No. 2: Give people frequent opportunities to reflect on how their career goals and interests align with organizational goals. This should happen more frequently than at the annual performance review. This activity should be at least a quarterly conversation during a staff or departmental meeting where stakeholders review the organizational goals and discuss briefly how each person or team is contributing to meeting them. If there are barriers, discuss those, too. Managers also should have individual meetings with employees to discuss their career aspirations, talents and strengths to see how these are aligned or not with organizational goals.

There is often pushback on rule No. 2 because employers assume employees won’t be honest, and employees assume they are being evaluated for cutbacks. To move past this barrier, a third-party consultant or coach can facilitate these conversations.

In 2009, the Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) at the University of Minnesota participated in an anonymous employee engagement survey, and determined that employees were generally happy in their work but didn’t see opportunities for growth. They also did not experience engaging conversations with managers regarding their aspirations within the organization.

To address these findings, CTS implemented changes to its performance management system by identifying core competencies, illuminating where employees excelled and where they needed development. They also involved employees in goal setting to ensure they were engaged in the process prior to addressing steps for individual improvement.

Rule No. 3: Build a high level of trust between employees and senior leadership. “We were more inclusive of staff offering ideas to reach our goals, and we had training for managers about how to engage employees in conversations about what is working in their jobs and what is not working,” said CTS Director Laurie McGinnis.

As a result, CTS built more trust and engagement between managers and staff while setting goals that fit the individual as well as the organization.

Rule No. 4: Help employees feel connected to the company’s mission, purpose and future success. These conversations should originate from leaders and management because employees need to understand their individual roles and value in the organization. Managers must ask questions to find out what is important to each employee, and then communicate those values in an individualized professional development plan. For example, CTS revisited its mission, vision and values and included employees in the conversations so the organizational structure also matched employees’ mission, vision and values. This alignment helps staff cope with shrinking budgets and organizational changes in leadership, McGinnis said.

Moving Forward Personally and Professionally
Adults questioned in the National Norms Survey reported their second greatest desire is for personal growth and development.

Rule No. 5: Support employee opportunities to expand skills, learn and grow. This does not require a huge formal training investment. Consider the 70/20/10 model developed by the Princeton University Center for Creative Leadership. About 70 percent of skill development and learning happens on the job. About 20 percent happens through contact and interaction with others. And 10 percent happens through formal classes, workshops or webinars. Encouraging workplace interactions such as peer learning, socializing and collaboration contributes to career satisfaction.

Rule No. 6: Happy employees trust and enjoy their co-worker relationships and feel energized by them. This rule also ties to two of Hallowell’s primary rules for helping employees shine: connect and play. In effect, managers should encourage interpersonal bond strengthening among team members and allow them to play together formally and informally to unleash their imaginations and enthusiasm.

Assign time for creative team activities during business hours and encourage socializing after business hours — as appropriate to the culture and industry. Employees can do this through friendly contests and competitions, but also through social outings such as golfing or bowling that place them in a fresh environment to learn about each other and their unique strengths and interests.

Enjoying co-worker relationships is an important element of career satisfaction across generations, but even more so for workers in their mid-20s to mid-40s who are blurring the lines between their professional and personal lives. Allowing downtime for employees to mingle and gather by the water cooler, even metaphorically through their mobile apps, will support career satisfaction and retention.

Rule No. 7: Provide opportunities for employees to demonstrate discretionary effort. Talent managers may have noted that younger employees don’t respond well to the command-and-control style of leadership that directs performance rather than encourages input and interaction. Author Daniel Pink has said that carrots and sticks worked in the 20th century, but today’s challenges require leaders to loosen the reins a bit and allow employees to rise to the occasion

In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink writes about the “deeply human need to direct our own lives.” He cites evidence that autonomy is a huge natural motivator, which is counter to traditional methods of leading from the top down.

Hallowell calls this grapple and grow, which suggests that talent managers should allow employees to step up, put in the extra effort and achieve mastery of their work. This can be done by delegating certain projects to team members and letting them brainstorm and come up with solutions. Autonomy also relates to flexible work environments in which employees choose the hours and methods to achieve objectives.

Rule No. 8: Give employees a reason to be proud of the organization. It follows that employees who feel a sense of autonomy — choosing how they work and achieve objectives — also should feel more ownership of the organization’s mission.

This is only the case, however, if organizations make good on the other rules: providing a clear long-term vision and the employee’s role within it, communicating regularly with employees on their aspirations and providing opportunities for growth and learning.

Rule No. 9: Watch for signs of burnout. Miss these important drivers of career satisfaction and talent managers will begin to notice signs of overworked and unhappy people. If these signs start to show up among top performers, the problem has immediately gotten bigger. Organizations that ignore the intangible workforce motivators will sabotage the one thing that every employee needs in today’s challenging work environment: resilience.

Signs of irritability, higher absenteeism, more frequent mistakes and missteps and emotional reactions are evidence that employee engagement and resilience are low. Schedule conversations quickly with top performers and be open to creative solutions that can help them get back in the saddle.

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The Difference Between Satisfied, Engaged, Aligned, and Highly Engaged Employees

Don’t settle for employee satisfaction. Push for highly aligned and engaged employees who are themselves pushing your company forward.

Let’s get one thing clear – we do not want satisfied employees. “Satisfied” implies sated, content. Do we want employees to be content with the current state? No. We want employees to always be pushing the boundaries and striving for the next level.

That’s why I get annoyed when people use the words “satisfied” and “engaged” interchangeably when talking about employees (as in this recent Talent Management article). Engaged employees are very different from satisfied employees. Indeed, Timothy Clark outlines these differences extensively in his book The Employee Engagement Mindset. In TLNT recently he highlighted in particular 5 Ways Engaged Employees Are Different(quoting):

1. Highly engaged employees take primary responsibility for their own engagement.
2. Highly engaged employees feel the least entitled.
3. Highly engaged employees engage customers.
4. Highly engaged employees remain highly engaged almost anywhere.
5. Highly engaged employees apply six behavioral drivers. Individuals who take personal and primary responsibility for their own engagement consistently apply six behavioral drivers: connecting, shaping, learning, stretching, achieving, and contributing.

In other words, highly engaged employee sustain their own engagement. I would argue “satisfied” employees are constantly looking for others to fulfill their requirements for satisfaction.

Engagement vs. Alignment

I would add one additional hallmark of highly engaged employees to Mr. Clark’s list: Highly engaged employees align their efforts with the company mission, vision and values.

To me, a hallmark of truly engaged employees is their ability and willingness to give additional discretionary effort on projects or objectives that are meaningful and important to the organization. It’s that last point that is a critical link.

George Labovitz and Victor Rosansky, authors of Rapid Realignment, see alignment and engagement as two different things entirely, as they explained in this guest post about their book on Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog:

“Engaged and aligned are two different things, and they don’t always travel together. Research by the Corporate Executive Board has found that 40 percent of “engaged” employees do not align their behavior with organizational goals. Overall, it concludes that only one in 10 employees is both engaged and aligned with strategy. Clearly, many managers are failing to connect people with the strategies they are emotionally prepared to support with their daily work. This represents a huge lost opportunity.”

How do connect employees with organizational strategies (many of which shifted thanks to the recession)? Youhelp them understand what those strategies look like in each employee’s daily work.

In other words, you make enterprise-wide strategy goals real at the local job level. And you do that by frequent, timely and specific reinforcement of employees who align their efforts with strategic objectives. Social recognition is the most powerful way to accomplish this, as you not only reinforce that message for a particular employee, but you also empower others to see that message and add their own messages of congratulations and understanding of how those contributions made a difference.

Are your employees satisfied, engaged, aligned, or highly engaged and aligned?

About the Author:

Derek is Vice President, Client Strategy & Consulting Services, at Globoforce, the world’s only provider of truly global, strategic employee recognition and reward programs. Their management team blogs regularly on Globoforce news, products, customers, and industry insights at the Globoforce Blog.