Better work, not more work

Your engagement strategy isn’t an engagement strategy. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I was reminded of that when reading the CIPD Employee Outlook Spring 2015. There’s some really good stuff in there, and some good insight into what people want from work.

But this stuck out for me. When measuring Employee Engagement, under “Going the extra mile” the two questions are:

• I will often take on more work to help relieve my colleagues’ workloads
• I will often work for more hours than those I am paid or contracted to do

I’ve got some concerns about those as markers of engagement.

It’s the same qualm that I share with this Engage for Success video. I really like E4S’s work, but just 40-odd seconds into this they’re talking about an engaged employee as “…the one that stays late when it really counts…”

That might be part of engagement, but it’s a small part. And there’s a risk too. Because if this idea...

...takes hold in your workforce, then any engagement strategy is sunk.

Now, for me, the solution to that is not talking about engagement. It isn’t an “engagement strategy”; it’s a “being-a-better-employer” strategy. But more than that, it’s about not taking a narrow view of the results of engagement. For me, an engaged employee is going to apply themselves more, but because they will enjoy and be satisfied by that greater application. That’s going to make for better work, not just more work.

Arguably, an office full of people staying late is a sign of disengagement. I mean, they don’t look very happy, do they? And maybe they need better support, and want a better work-life balance, And, just maybe, if they were a bit more engaged, they’d have got the work done in the working day. They’d have seen the issue more clearly, they’d have made fewer errors, they’d have brought more people with them.

If your people should have gone home for their tea, what does it really say?

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.

Statistical Significance

It’s been a while since I blogged. So what better topic to get back into the swing of things than Statistical Significance? (I know! How have I gone this long without one?!)

I like to think of statistical significance as one of those things that I can get excited about, so you don’t have to. And, if I’m really honest, few of my clients do get all that excited about it. That’s their loss. But they do often appreciate the insight it provides. I consider it part of my overall strategy for turning data into stories. After all, if you’ve got both then you’ve got more ways to convince more people of your truth.

So, if I’ve got a load of results from:

• a survey
• a series of 360 reviews
• focus groups who have scored some qualities of where they work

Then I can rank those scores top to bottom. And I can produce some nice tables and charts. I can tell you what the top 5 and bottom 5 are. Or top 10 and bottom 10. Or, well you get the idea. But what’s to say the top 5, 10, whatever are the most important?

If people have grasped any statistical concept, then it tends to be that of the bell curve. You can picture the shape, and you probably understand that in a “normal distribution” most results will be in the main body of the curve – the bulgy bit. They may be high or low, but if they’re in the middle, then that highness or lowness isn’t yet significant. It’s only when they move to the left or right that they get more interesting.

So I’ll look at your results and tell you what are the significant top x results and the significant bottom y results. Those that are apart for the rest of the results; those that people feel most strongly about. Of course, I’m conscious of “lies, damn lies and statistics”. Sometimes I’ll use a standard deviation, sometimes an average deviation – it’s got to be what throws most light on the data.

That gives me – and my clients – more confidence that we’re looking at the truly important, symbolic or compelling results. And we can build that into a more powerful narrative – of what’s being said, what needs changing and what should be done.

Millennials

Millennials are a hot topic. I’m not sure when we decided not to call them Gen Y anymore, but that now seems to be the thing. And I fully understand why it’s discussed a lot. There’s all these people coming into the workplace, they’re our leaders of the future, and I don’t understand them. I don’t know how to support or please them. That’s going to worry people.

Some of the articles and research should give you pause for thought. EY (and others) will report that millennials are more entitled than older workers, that they are less good team players. There’s some decent academic research behind that too. Which leads to opinion pieces on how to weed out these unholy characteristics.

But for each of those articles, I seem to read a contradictory one. Now, I am fully aware of the levels of confirmation bias at play here. As previously discussed, I like things simple. I will naturally be more persuaded and seek more articles that make life simpler. I know that. But since I have to get off the fence, why not aim for the softer landing?

And – with that in mind – it’s this or this kind of article that I find more convincing. Yes, millennials are optimistic, over-ambitious and naïve to an endearing/irritating degree [delete as applicable], but that’s a function of youth. Once we were like that too.

But there are some cultural aspects at play here. So it’s claimed that millennials want more feedback. You know what? They probably do. Communication is more instant. We all take great umbrage if a brand deigns not to tweet us back in 5 minutes. Do millennials want meaning and purpose in their work? I reckon they probably do. They’ve been force-fed that idea from the cradle, an idea that didn’t really have much meaning for previous generations. (And I’m not convinced that their behaviour backs this up; who do they most want to work for?).

For me, like this article, it’s being aware of differences. But being aware that there’s more that we all have in common than divides us.