Is there a secret to great employee engagement?

“When people are disengaged, they’re generally unhappy in their lives, so think about the value in turning one disengaged person into an engaged person, which means they’re enjoying their job, which means they’re going home happier to their family, which means they’re parenting better, which means they’re better citizens, and community members and it’s really important.”

So says Christine Tatham (pictured left), vice-president of people and culture at Redbrick in Victoria when asked about the value and importance to an organization that has great engagement levels in the workforce.

But according to new research from Gartner, employee engagement levels may be suffering, as only 31% of workers surveyed are saying they are highly engaged.

The survey of nearly 3,500 employees in June shows that 31% are more likely to stay with the organization and the same number are willing to go above and beyond, leaving a majority feeling not so engaged.

But are these numbers proving to be an outlier in today’s engagement scores?

“The thing I think that I always think about when I say these kinds of headlines is, first of all, do we want it to be better? Of course we do. Is 100% achievable for any one organization? Of course it isn’t. But I think that highly engaged proportion, we’re always working on getting as many people as engaged as possible but [low engagement] has always been around,” says Miriam Connaughton (pictured right), chief people and experience officer at Simpplr in San Francisco.

Can more vacation and time away from work be part of the answer? Yes, says a recent survey by Achievers Workforce Institute (AWI).

The critical role of people managers

For organizations looking to solve the engagement puzzle, a large part of the equations rests with its people leaders, according to Gartner, as they are responsible for 10 out of 12 actions that can engage employees.

However, it also showed that only 19% of supervisors even know how to act on worker feedback.

This has been borne out from previous research done years ago by Gallup, says Connaughton.

“What they found was that 70% of employee engagement can be explained by factors that relate to your relationship with your immediate manager, and things like the trust you have in them, the quality of the relationship; how regularly they talk to you, how transparent they are as a leader, how well they communicate. There are lots of different factors but a lot of them are related to that relationship between the team member and their immediate manager.”

Another Gartner study showed that 77% of workers are placing more emphasis on the importance of the manager in engagement efforts.

Don’t economize on people investments

While the value of leaders today is still apparent, much of the problem might be placed at the foot of corporate accounting practices, according to Tatham.

“A lot of employers or senior management, they balk at the idea of making an investment in people: they see the number, the price tag that might come with some new software or employee development plans or anything like that and they see that initial cost, and they’re not willing to make that investment, instead of looking at the longer term return on investment that they’d be making and looking at the overall cost of increased attrition when they’re not investing in people.”

By focusing on this initial cost, company money managers are doing a disservice to the overall success of the organization.

“They’re losing people, they have costs to replace the people. They’re losing people through decreased engagement because they’re losing productivity from people. They’re just looking at this one cost and they’re thinking: ‘We can’t afford that right now so we’re not going to invest in our people right now,’ but then they’re losing people and people aren’t working as hard,” she says.

While spending more money on reaching workers is important, a leader’s job in boosting engagement is much more challenging today that it was pre-COVID, according to Connaughton.

“I think one hypothesis, and we don’t have enough data yet to prove this or disprove it, but one hypothesis on why engagement is trending down a little bit is because we’re working in these evermore distributed ways that didn’t get created but certainly got accelerated in 2020. It’s harder for us to feel that closer connection to our organizations; to our purpose, to our leaders, to our teammates.”

“One of the things that I know we work on is about finding ways to engage people differently when they’re hyper-dispersed,” she says.

Wellbeing support is severely lacking in many organizations, found another survey.

Laser focus on work-life balance

But there are some ways to reach those far-flung employees, says Tatham, and it starts with not overloading them with work.

“I was really proud in our last employee engagement survey that 92% of people agreed on the statement: I have energy and time for my life outside of work. A lot of companies say work-life balance is extremely important to us and come work for us and then when you get there, you realize that you’re really pushed to work 10 hours a day, six days a week and work-life balance isn’t really their value,” she says.

The value of acting on feedback

Listening, and more importantly, acting upon worker concerns, goes a long way toward achieving the high engagement rating.

“If you’re going to survey people, you have to be willing to make the investment to address their feedback and if you can’t, if there’s a real valid reason why you can’t address their feedback, you have to explain why: you can’t just sweep it under the rug and pretend they didn’t give that feedback and just not acknowledge it.”

“You have to say: ‘We’re hearing you say this but right now, we can’t do this, because it is important to us that we do this,’ so that they know that they’re being heard, and they’re not just providing feedback that’s going nowhere,” says Tatham.

And to encourage engagement buy-in from senior leadership, use language they understand, she says.

“I think the best thing that HR can do is really to speak to executives in the language that they’re used to speaking so really build a business case, and take it to your leaders and talk about the return on investment of making these investments so that they can really see the value and see that it’s not just a cost that’s been made.”

“It’s taking numbers to them; talk about the cost of attrition, talk about the cost of underperformance and disengagement, build them a business case that they can’t say no to and when you’re able to use numbers to support your case, it’s harder to argue with: it’s here’s the value. Here’s the reason this is what we need to do and continue to have that conversation, continue to make the ask and continue to ask your people what they need as well,” says Tatham.