Can you put a figure on engagement?

I don’t want to come over as a nay-sayer, fault-finder or nit-picker. But do you know what I don’t believe in? Comparing engagement between different companies

Look at these two surveys one from Gallup and this in conjunction with CIPD. The former has “not engaged” globally at 63% and “actively disengaged” at 24%; the latter “disengaged” in the UK at 3%. It’s perfectly evident that they’re measuring different things. And I think that’s because there isn’t a very reliable definition of engagement, and where the boundaries are to job satisfaction, motivation, advocacy etc etc and so on. So comparisons are bound to be hard. I also think that engagement in one company could well look quite different from engagement in the next - so it'll score differently.

And when Gallup further report that in the US the figure is 51% “not engaged”, what does this tell us? Is the US doing things much better than the rest of the world? Or are there so many cultural and environmental differences that comparison is hard? Or, again, are they measuring different things in different ways?

Credit where it’s due of course. And in the same research there’s a lot of extremely valuable insight. Read the CIPD one in particular. They cover a lot of people and they’re able to repeat the research year-on-year, deepening the insight.

And I like a survey as much as the next man. Probably more in fact. I really do like a survey. But I wonder whether it’s really possible to understand engagement through a simple survey. It’s a complex area. Even if you agree the constituent parts, how each person interprets the question (In my team or my department? Right now or ever? Does it have to happen continuously or just sometimes?) leaves a large margin of error.

But what I do think a survey can do is perform a really good triage: what’s good, what’s not so good, what’s a bit meh. Followed up with a deeper dive, then I believe you can build a really good picture of engagement in your company. You can create your own definition in fact. And then use surveys – frequently – to keep testing your solutions and programs. You just don’t need to waste energy keeping up with Jones Ltd.