Employee Engagement: Restoring Viability to a Corporate Cliché

Employee engagement has taken over the corporate world. Whether it is the media, consulting firms, business leaders or human resources, everyone is talking about it. Despite the buzz in the corporate world and millions of dollars pumped into the industry, employee engagement has remained relatively unchanged and our comprehension of it is hazy. Examining the concept of employee engagement from conceptualization to present day helps provide a solid understanding of its foundation and where major evolutionary failings occurred. Prompted by Gallup’s takeover of the concept – from packaging, selling, measuring and intervening – the essence of employee engagement has been lost in overdrive and is now focused on statistics rather than people. The purpose of this paper is to identify the major flaws in the current state of employee engagement using its past as a basis of restoring viability to the concept. EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: RESTORING VIABILITY 3 Employee Engagement: Restoring Viability to a Corporate Cliché In recent decades, the evolving concept of “employee engagement” has gained traction in the business world. Leaders from all industries are preaching the importance of employee engagement in the workplace. Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, stressed this mindset stating: “There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow” (Haydon, 2014). The concept has quite rapidly transformed from being virtually undefined in 1989 to the most prominent corporate cliché of our time. Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends (2014) found that 79% of organizations rated retention and engagement as “urgent” or “important. ” It is clear employers are infatuated with the idea of measuring and improving their own employees’ engagement, but do they truly understand the essence of the concept or do they crave “engagement” simply to stay on trend? The term “employee engagement” was first defined in 1990 by William Kahn as, “the harnessing of organizational members’ selves to their work roles [by which they] employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances” (Kahn, 1990, p. 694). Kahn’s original definition emphasized the importance of fostering employees’ engagement in their work roles by allowing them to bring their personal skills and interests to the job. In comparison, modern definitions of employee engagement are much more far-reaching in order to include as many engagement factors as possible, hence the lack of an agreed-upon definition. Though Kahn was the first to define employee engagement, it was not until a decade later that the concept gained a following thanks to Gallup’s First, Break All the EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: RESTORING VIABILITY 4 Rules (1999). Gallup capitalized on the chaotic, desperate state of the workplace by packaging and selling a convenient employee engagement package complete with extensive marketing, persuasive statistics and a one-of-a-kind employee engagement measurement tool. Ever since Gallup’s resurrection of employee engagement, employers around the world are investing millions in hopes of being one of the lucky organizations that can call their employees “engaged. ” Led by Gallup, consulting firms were no doubt successful at increasing the recognition and relevance of the concept, but they also contributed to its rushed evolution. Despite the inflated interest and buzz in the corporate world, our comprehension of the drivers and outcomes of engagement remains relatively limited and, further, what we think we know about engagement is likely inaccurate due to the manipulation of weak data. Consulting firms account for the majority of the existing data, but, unfortunately, the bulk of their employee engagement research is correlational. This means the vast majority of existing data is solely descriptive, which is alarming considering Gallup is marketing the data as if there is a causal relationship between employee engagement and performance. This lack of academic backing highlights the major methodological blockade that is preventing both the advancement of our understanding of the concept and the enhancement of employee engagement levels in the workplace. Millions of dollars have been spent in hopes of improving organizations’ engagement scores, but for what? Engagement scores across the workforce remain relatively unchanged despite all of the marketing, measuring and hype that have been invested in the concept. The deficiency of results combined with the lack of EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: RESTORING VIABILITY 5 understanding of what engagement is illustrates the ambiguous state of employee engagement. It is time to critically evaluate the evolution of the concept, identify the flaws and establish rehabilitation strategies in efforts to restore viability to employee engagement. EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: RESTORING VIABILITY 6 Chapter I: Constructed & Evolved Conceptual Evolution The modern interpretation of employee engagement is the culmination of theories, concepts, research and definitions that have built upon each other over time, as illustrated in Table 2. The roots of employee engagement are seen in the human relations school of management. The human relations approach was the third strand of development in modern management coming after scientific management and financial control (“The Human Relations Approach,” 2014). The theoretical beginnings of an ethical approach to management are seen post-World War I in the works of UK’s Charles S. Myers and B. S. Rowntree. As the director of the National Institute of Psychology, Myers promoted studies of employee problems with an emphasis on fatigue in effort to resolve the many existing work issues (“The Human Relations Approach,” 2014). In his work titled Mind and work, the psychological factors in industry and commerce, Myers argued that “of the four main determinants of industrial and commercial efficiency – the mechanical, the physiological, the psychological, and the social and economic – the psychological is by far the most important and fundamental” (Myers, 1920, p. 5). His status as the director of the National Institute of Psychology and strength of argument in his various works prompted the beginning of a professional body of research concerning the “mind in work. ” During the same period, B. S. Rowntree wrote The Human Factor in Business, in which he argued for five undisputable conditions, which must be secured for workers – a national minimum wage, fair work hours including breaks and holidays, greater economic security and good working conditions (Rowntree, 1921, p. 7). Rowntree briefly mentions importance of engagement of employees in his work saying, “his (the EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: RESTORING VIABILITY 7 employment manager) duties begin with the engagement of the workers” (Rowntree, 1921, p. 47). The importance of engagement is stressed both at the start of a workers career – “The interview on engagement is a valuable means of giving the new worker, at the very beginning, the right kind of personal environment, and the right outlook” (Rowntree, 1921, p. 48) – and if an employee is transferred to a different department of the organization. Rowntree’s insights marked the theoretical beginning of the human relations approach but highlight how far psychology had to go – he stressed the importance of engaging employees, but only at critical shifts in the individual’s career. In addition, he mentions the role people have to play in engaging the employee, but only through human resources professionals, not the manager himself. Though Myers’ and Rowntree’s work showcased the theoretical beginnings of the human relations approach, the human relations school of management that has remained to this day was kick-started by Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne Studies. These influential studies were conducted from 1927 to 1932 at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Chicago, Illinois (“The Human Relations Movement,” 2012). The impetus for Mayo’s research was a routine study of the effect of lighting on productivity from 1924 to 1927 (“The Human Relations Movement,” 2012). No correlation between the two variables was found which prompted further research as to what variables actually do affect worker productivity (“The Human Relations Movement,” 2012). The longest running of all of the Mayo’s Hawthorne experiments concerned the output a group of six female assembly workers who were picked out from the rest of the Western Electric workforce solely for the experiment’s purpose (“The Human Relations Movement,” 2012). Two major findings came about from this study: the experimenter effect and the social effect (“The EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: RESTORING VIABILITY 8 Human Relations Movement,” 2012). In regards to the experimenter effect, when the workers realized the management was paying extra attention to their work, their morale was boosted and their output was positively affected. This finding was coined the Hawthorne Effect – “the stimulation to output or accomplishment that results from the mere fact of being under observation” (Merriam-Webster). Similarly, the social effect had a positive influence on worker productivity (“The Human Relations Movement,” 2012). The workers who were picked out from the masses as the chosen subjects developed a special bond; the special attention increased the productivity of those in the in-group due to their common purpose. Mayo reasoned that “the six individuals became a team and the team gave itself wholeheartedly and spontaneously to co-operation in an experiment” and concluded that mental attitudes, proper supervision and informal social relationships experienced in a group were critical for productivity and job satisfaction (Mayo, 1945, p. 64). These findings were revolutionary in the 1930s – no longer was it the dominant school of thought to view employees as a single cog in t