In the HR business, we tend to focus on engagement, how it's created and maintained. Why wouldn't we? Well, perhaps we should think more about dis-engagement. Why - because we know that engagement lies at one end of a road which leads back to alienation and burnout. This was demonstrated some years ago by Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter http://bit.ly/y79T9v.  And, to complicate matters, there's constant two way traffic along the route to engagement, because engagement is not a fixed, isolated point in which individuals exist permanently. Even the most energetic, dedicated and determined of us have bad days; days when feel less committed and may think about giving up and walking away from the pressures and frustrations of our job.  But many such people - like Stephen Hester at RBS for example http://bbc.in/wYF09G - will pause, reflect and then return their shoulders on the wheel. And for Hester and his peers, the prospect of re-engaging must look much rosier when it comes with the lure of a giant pay packet, benefits to match and the prospect of personal honours and accolades. So what must it be like for those at the other end of the road: the disengaged, disaffected or those suffering from burnout? For them, work provides few incentives, little reward and a lot of daily discomfort: "Work isn't exhilarating, it's exhausting. Rather than feeling enthusiasm, employees ... have to drag themselves into work every day. The people around them ask 'what's wrong?' 'are you feeling OK?'  They feel increasingly detached from work as something that's meaningful. They may even feel that they no longer are competent at what they do. These feelings and subsequent disengagement emerge over time."  (See http://bit.ly/z2gIfI pp 146). For these individuals, unlike Stephen Hester, re-engaging is not an attractive prospect. This isn't just a theoretical issue. For just as engagement brings all the benefits we know about, disaffected employees can severely damage a business by failing to perform, adding cost and driving customers away. And without tangible incentives, those lower in the hierarchy are more more likely to remain alienated and negative.  So who are the disengaged, how do we find them and how do we help them to reconnect? To answer these questions we need to understand that disengagement can manifest itself in very different ways. For example, some employees are disengaged because their jobs fail - in whatever ways - to meet their own needs and expectations. They may feel bored, pressurised, underpaid and undervalued by peers or managers. Skilled managers can often work with employees in this kind of situation to resolve some or all of these issues and return them to being fully functioning members of the work group. There's another, more difficult scenario: although predisposed to be positive and to throw themselves into their work, some employees may find they're just not able to match their colleagues' sustained high levels of enthusiasm and commitment. As a result, they can feel they fall short of others' norms and standards of behaviour and this may, for them, be just as stressful as being overwhelmed by volume of work, or lacking training or resources. Peter Warr coined the term the 'vitamin effect' - i.e. too much of a good thing can be bad for you - to describe this this syndrome (http://bit.ly/xYOuKx). In such cases, despite their best efforts, some employees may not be able to  keep up the pace and fall by the wayside. As a response to negative feelings about their own competence, they may detach themselves from work and colleagues. They can even develop serious medical conditions  hypertension and cardiovascular disease, for example.  Spotting disengaged employees from a corporate perspective should be a basic part of the employee survey process - but it's not always straightforward. First, when looking at the data, we tend to look mainly at the results for the most positive groups of employees. We also see that the scores for certain locations or departments tend to be lower. We'll usually explain the latter (often correctly) by reference to a certain line manager, or poor working conditions, or a threat of redundancy. The scores for related items will provide the necessary evidence. These are the (relatively) easy cases. It's too easy to gloss over the feedback from isolated individuals who work in highly engaged teams yet, for some reason, aren't on side. The signs will often there in the data - the few individuals who score very, very differently from the positive majority. These may be the burnout cases - How can we tell?  One test will be to look specifically at the scores for survey items that measure personal work engagement. Such questions may not be included in many employee surveys, but As consultants with an occupational psychology background we believe them to be an essential component of any engagement survey. See, for example, the well validated Utrecht Work Engagement Scale http://bit.ly/zhJ48B which measure three dimensions of personal work engagement i.e. vigour, absorption and dedication.    The responses to these questions will provide useful pointers to which employees are least engaged at the time the survey was conducted. But how do we tell whether the data refer to those who are affected in the long term or simply those making a brief (hourly or daily) detour from the road to engagement?  Traditional survey methods can't really help here.  To be sure that employees are at the burnout end of the road, it's necessary to measure their engagement on a number of occasions in real-time, and to respond accordingly. That's where our new, unique product - EngageMe - comes in.  EngageMe measures feelings of work engagement (on the three Utrecht scales) twice daily over a two or three week period. Simultaneously, data are also collected on what tasks or activities respondents were doing as they answered the questions. At the same time managers - as well as the respondents themselves - have constant and real-time access to the data. The output is a detailed map of engagement for an individual, a group or an entire organisation - at any given moment.  It's then up to the participants - leaders, managers or employees - to act. Trials are underway at the moment. We'll be reporting the findings in the coming weeks and months, as EngageMe is launched and goes viral. Find out more at http://bit.ly/yh7hI6          

You may have read about a large scale study of employee engagement conducted by the Corporate Leadership Council back in 2004 http://bit.ly/wFU8LM  The project involved a survey using 47 questions that measured the strength of rational and emotional commitment to day-to-day work, direct manager, team, and organization, along with the level of discretionary effort and intent to stay.  More than 50,000 employees from 59 organizations, 30 countries, and 14 industries participated in the 2004 survey. The data were strongly skewed in favour of the US, but that aside, the demographic profile of respondents was pretty wide.  The respondent population, it emerged, were distributed into three broad groups:   11% were 'True Believers' who show strong emotional and rational commitment to their work, team, manager and organisation  13% were 'Disaffected' and strongly uncommitted to work, managers, teams and the organisation 20% leant towards non-commitment 27% were stronlgly commtted to one focus - ie job, team, manager or organisation The remaining 29% were truly ambivalent   So no real surprises there - these figures are pretty representative of the overall picture we tend to see in our own engagement surveys. An analysis of different demographics (age, gender, grade, marital status etc) showed little variation among individual employees - which also fits with our data, except, perhaps, that we tend to find that more senior grades tend to manifest greater levels of engagement. Of more interest, however, (though again, probably unsurprisingly) were the very wide differences between organisations. In the highest scoring companies, almost 24% of respondents were strongly engaged with work, team, manager and organisation, while in the lowest scoring businesses, fewer than 3% appeared to be fully engaged. In other words, in some businesses, eight times as many employees were strongly engaged as in others. Obviously, there were some simple and fairly obvious differences which heped to explain this variation - personality types, job differences for example - but the data suggested a very wide variety of factors affected engagement within and between these busineses. Which made it difficult for the Report to make any general prescriptions. So once again practitioners were advised that the best way to build and maintain engagement "... all depended"  on the prevailing circumstances within the specific organisation. Not very helpful. And that's often the situation today, when one looks for some kind of practical advice and support. Add to this the radical conclusion of Schaufeli, Bakker et al  (http://bit.ly/zlbHbR)  that engagement levels are constantly changing, daily, even hourly, and the challenge remains more daunting than ever. General prescriptions are of only general use to the manager, consultant or HR practitioner seeking a practical way to manage engagement in the real world of organisations today. That's why we at Employee Feedback have taken a different approach: EngageMe is a completely new tool designed to provide down to earth assistance with the engagement of specific groups of employee within a given organsiation - in real time. http://bit.ly/wwZLHm. Building on current research findings, EngageMe provides an immediate overview of what individuals and teams are feeling - and why. This information can be used by team leaders and managers - and employees themselves - to react and respond appropriately to what's going on in the business - NOW. Successful strategies can be identified and learned from. Issues and problems affecting engagement can be spotted and dealt with quickly. EngageMe isn't a panacea, or a replacement for the detailed overview that a 'traditional' engagement survey provides. But it is, we believe,the first practical tool that practitioners can use on a day to day basis to monitor and manage engagement. Which is what many of those who have long experience of employee surveys have been seeking for some time. The product is currently being tested and we'll write again to describe the results in practice. We'll also publish regular updates on our website.        

In a recent article in the Journal of Industrial and Organisational Psychology entitled ‘Manage Employee Engagement to Manage Performance’, Saks and Gruman (2011) state that they ‘believe the best way to improve performance management in organisations today is to focus on employee engagement, which is a more proximal and controllable outcome that precedes and predicts performance’ (p204). Pukalos and O’Learly (2011) recently wrote about performance management too, whereby they claimed that formal performance management involves processes that are not connected to the employees and the relationship level of day to day working. They suggest that to generate an effective performance management system, the focus should be on the relationship level, thereby channelling efforts into the manager-employee interaction and communication between employees. It has been found that the quality of the relationships and communication is key as it can have a ‘profound effect’ on how employees ultimately engage with the performance management system and therefore the outcomes that they then experience. Saks & Gruman (2011) suggest that in order to create the shift in performance management needed, the manager needs to create three conditions, as outlined by Kahn (1990), to foster employee engagement: increase the psychological meaningfulness of role for individuals; improve psychological safety, whereby one feels able to achieve role performance without fear of harming career or self-image; and enable more opportunity for psychological availability, referring to an individual’s perception of how available one is to taking on the role. These conditions are seen as necessary to foster engagement from employees, creating the necessary environment for individuals to choose to engage in their role and with the wider workforce and organisation. Saks & Gruman (2011) conclude with a great summary sentence: ‘Thus, fixing performance management requires managing employee engagement to manage performance’ (p206). It is also important to remember that employee engagement research is plentiful, being labelled as the key to organisational effectiveness and competitiveness. Macey, Schneider, Barbera & Young (2009; cited in Saks & Gruman, 2011) found that the top 25% on an engagement index out of 65 businesses from various sectors, had greater profitability, greater return on assets and over double the shareholder value compared to the bottom 25%. It may be that by ‘fixing’ performance management systems that other returns are achievable too. References:Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33, 425-442.Macey, W. H. Schneider, B. Barbera, K. M. Young, S. A. (2009). Employee engagement: Tools for analysis, practice and competitive advantage. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Pulakos, E.D.  O’Leasry, R. S. (2011). Why is performance management broken? Industrial and Organisational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 4, 146-164.Saks, A. Gruman, J. (2011). Manage Employee Engagement to Manage Performance. Industrial and Organisational Psychology, 4, 204-207.

Adrian C. Ott, an adviser on customer strategy and innovation, recently wrote a blog on the Harvard Business Review website. She titled the piece ‘Are scorecards and metrics killing employee engagement?’. What an interesting question, to which the answer, I suspect, is actually ‘yes’, although to my knowledge there is no research to back this up. It seems intuitive that rules and procedures are put in place to protect businesses, especially in dispersed businesses where managers need to protect their employees, the business and even the customers in some cases. So, with the introduction of all these performance measures, rules, policies, metrics to measure all sorts of organisational outcomes, it often mean that employees lose their discretion to respond to events that require a response outside of the box and this can cause issues, not only for the employees themselves, but also for the customers and ultimately for the organisation.Ott, shares the example of army personnel trying to board a plane. They were told that they needed to pay for their extra luggage although their military orders said this was not the case. The incident was caputured on video  –  see news report and video clips here. The airline employees continued down the path that the army personnel had to pay for their additional luggage due to the policies and regulations set by management further up the chain.We have all been there – there is no one higher up the chain that you can speak to, no one accountable for the response from the organisation. Grrr, as a customer this is very frustrating! The lack of autonomy for employees often means that they feel their judgement is not valued and they become disengaged and unlikely to ‘go the extra mile’ for their organisation or to provide exceptional service to customers.Given that employee engagement has been linked to a number of organisational effectiveness outcomes, it seems practical, especially in these tough times, that employee discretion, a sense of autonomy over jobs is the way forward. 

We often get asked what motivates people, how best to engage employees and what rewards should be used to retain talent. The answer we give does not usually involve money! Whilst it is clear that money has a role in an employee’s commitment to an organisation, it has been found that for people with satisfactory salaries non-financial motivators work better at improving employee engagement. It seems an intuitive response that money motivates employees. Most people, when asked what motivates employees, will say money as the top response. However, research consistently shows that this is not the top item employees request when asked by management. No, the rewards they tend to request centre around praise from their managers, recognition from the leaders and autonomy such as having the opportunity to lead projects or make decisions for themselves. Whilst money does have a role to play when salaries are not seen as competitive with the industry and may have a knock on effect for retaining talent, those earning what they consider to be satisfactory salaries want things that feature higher up Maslow’s hierarchy. In a Mckinsey Quarterly Survey it was found that non-financial incentives play a critical role in ensuring that employees feel valued, demonstrating that the organisation not only understands their needs but also that the organisation takes their wellbeing seriously. These are issues that reverberate through much of the employee engagement literature – recognise, appreciate, praise your employees and give them the autonomy to drive things forward in their own way, requiring trust that this is possible. But, despite the abundance of literature on this topic it still seems that employers believe that money is the root to motivation, bonuses being seen as the dominant way to engage most people. Additionally, spending time praising and communicating with employees can be a timely process whereas money is seen as a much quicker way to motivate. However, quick wins do not often stand the test of time and it is often the long term motivators, where people feel valued and part of something bigger than themselves that they want to be part of the organisation, that they are engaged in their role, willing to go that extra mile for a little bit longer.Reference Link: www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Motivating_people_Getting_beyond_money_2460