The 2023 word of the year - “employee engagement”
The Minneapolis StarTribune kicked off the new year by outlining a concoction of challenges, including the labor shortage, stagnant growth, and plummeting productivity. Two days later, the New York Times attributed the productivity dip to excessive staff turnover, citing the associated financial and human costs, including burnout of senior employees. Collectively, we’ve dedicated millions of hours in 2022 to discussing high quit rates, burnout and other work-related trends. This year, I propose we dedicate more attention to the one solution for all these ills - employee engagement.
Employee engagement is defined as the mental and emotional connection people feel toward the work they do, their teams, and their organization. It’s not an abstract concept, but a field of study that’s been around for at least 30 years and can be measured both qualitatively and quantitatively. The global analytics firm Gallup has measured employee engagement in over 2.7 million workers. They found that teams who score in the top quartile of employee engagement have 23% higher profitability, 14% higher productivity, and 81% less absenteeism than those in the bottom quartile.
Engaged teams also experience 18% lower turnover within organizations that experience high turnover annually (more than 40%). Within organizations that have lower turnover (less than 40% annually), engaged teams a whopping 43% less turnover than disengaged teams. It also helps recruitment, as engaged employees are 23 times more likely than disengaged workers to say they’d recommend their organization as a great place to work.
Improving employee engagement isn’t just a boon for organizations though, it’s the only antidote to burnout. “I thought rest or quitting was the antidote to burnout,” you may retort. Rest is the solution to one component of burnout (exhaustion); the other two components are cynicism (the inability to see find meaning in your work) and inefficacy (lacking the tools to be effective at work). Rest doesn’t address cynicism or inefficacy; only employee engagement does. If this concept is a panacea to the conundrums plaguing our economy, then why aren’t more organizations applying it in their workforce? Why do only 25% of organizations even have an employee engagement strategy?
Because it’s easier (but not cheaper) to invest in employee satisfaction than employee engagement.
If there’s one thing to know about employee engagement, it’s that it’s not the same as employee satisfaction. Satisfaction is a one-way street paved by factors like salary, benefits, and schedule - the aspects an employer controls. Many employers now recognize they must be competitive in these areas to even maintain a workforce, so they’ve responded by raising wages, increasing benefits and offering flexible schedules. I refer to these as “maintenance changes” and they’ve have had little effect on quit rates, productivity levels or burnout.
Unlike satisfaction, employee engagement is a two-way street characterized by factors like effective communication, recognition, purpose and relationships. Employee engagement doesn’t merely maintain workers, it motivates them. A salary increase may temporarily motivate someone, but eventually they return to investing the same amount of energy into their work as before. If there’s any lesson from our collective obsession with “quiet quitting” in 2022, it’s that we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns – while still important, money is no longer the only motivating factor when it comes to investing in our jobs.
Maintenance changes are easier to implement and have become tables stakes in this tight labor market. Many organizations avoid employee engagement work because it’s hard to do. It includes asking the right questions to understand each employee’s unique motivations and source of purpose. It necessitates courage to provide an environment for people to thrive as individuals, while also supporting organizational success. Employee engagement isn’t an annual survey, it’s a deliberate decision to put humans first every single day (even the days you’re exhausted and burned out too). Doesn’t providing an annual raise and ample PTO sound a lot easier right now?
Minnesota is home to one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country and occupies the bottom third of GDP growth since early 2020. We can be exceptional in other ways too. We can be first in the nation for employee engagement levels, raising our productivity and lowering the stress on our workforce as a result. We can be home to organizations that invest in employee satisfaction and engagement. We’re Minnesotans – we can do the hard thing.