Bench Marks

Making an external comparisons between your engagement data organisations is a waste of effort.

Let me make three - brief - arguments against. In each case, let's think about an engagement survey.

1) When you recieve the results of your own survey, you'll - immediately - start to contextualise results. What happened that means one score is high, another one low, why another has increased. When you look at others' data, you have none of that context.

2) If you are re-running a survey, for each score there are three scenarious: gone up, gone down, stayed the same. Add in a comparison and now there are nine scenarios: gone up internally and externally, gone up internally/stayed same externally etc
Whatever we might think, humans are just not that good at handling numbers. Add in too many variables and we lose sight of the bigger picture.

3) Look at global engagemnt surveys and what % of people they say are engaged. They all give different numbers. The only reliable benchmark is your own.

I love and truly believe in engagement surveys. They can help define what makes your organisation better, more productive, safer etc. But looking externally is most often a distraction.

If you introduce distraction, you allow people off the hook for their results.

A shift to care

My other hope is a bit more complex. A societal mind-shift, and they don't come easily.

We now know the value of care. For children in schools. For older generations by carers, in residential homes.

I don't wish to keep harking back; my glasses are often dirty, not rose-tinted. But not too far back, in a two-adult household, often only one would work. (Obvs this was usually a heterosexual couple, and usually the woman had less/no choice in their role. I DO NOT advocate this). Consequently, there was the capacity to care for others.

We can now see the importance of this - life and death for older people. For it to happen again, there are 3 changes needed.
1. We need to pay a genuine living wage, not just the minumum we can get away with
2. We need to assess the cost of living. Why does it need two salaries? (Of course, in change 1, we've just made many things more expensive...)
3. We (all) need to review what it is to live. What makes us long-term happy vs what gives us a temporary dopamine buzz

Do I think it'll happen? Probably not.

It requires society to and the economy to change, and that requires new beliefs. That happens slowly.

But I hope it sows a seed. I hope some people or organisations challenge the status quo - and helps us live, not just survive.