It aint where you're from, it's where you're at

Following the link from one of the brilliant folk I follow on twitter (@JoeGerstandt), I found myself digging into a website on employee engagement.

I downloaded a powerpoint from a recent webinar that outlined some of their research. Among some key points they offered are that:

• 1/5 employees are highly disengaged;
• 60% of employees are planning on a job or career shift upon economic recovery;
• Of people planning on leaving, disengaged employees are 24% less likely to quit than engaged employees and 25% of those employees noted as having high potential plan on leaving;
• Most importantly, when we look at managerial effectiveness around leading or re-engaging disengaged employees, 63% of managers are rated as ineffective.

This is interesting stuff and it struck a deeply personal tone with me in regards to some of my previous administrative work. I’m not really into programs that give things like the “6 Universal Engagement Drivers,” as they tend to seem a lot like quick fixes. Not that this is how the folks who developed this intend it, but more often the resources available to organizations to work towards solving long term organizational diseases are few. This, at least in my experiences, results in managers who want to throw a seminar or retreat rather than get reflective and work towards systemic change. These are the types of bureaucrats who blame the employees, then blame the system, and never take a look at what they or their henchpeople contribute to organizational dysfunction.

When I consider the opportunities for organizational growth in Quantum Workplace’s six principles, I am also mindful that my professional and volunteer life has been spent in public service. I’ve not worked in a for-profit organization, aside from consulting, since working menial food-labor work as a teen, and even that was short lived. As long as you can avoid the trap of thinking that Quantum Workplace’s checklist is not a simple cure-all for first-level (or surface level) change, they can be adapted to fit a number of organizational settings. It would not take much to tweak the “6 Universal Engagement Drivers” into something relevant for much of my professional experience. A few changes in terminology would do it. They would include:

• Caring and competent management and leadership;
• Effective managers who articulate organizational values, are aligned with those values, and foster such alinment among subordinants and colleagues;
• Effective teamwork is encouraged, supported, and rewarded across multiple organizational levels;
• Job enrichment and professional growth opportunities;
• Valuing and recognizing employee contributions; and
• A genuine concern for employee well-being.

Somewhere in here, though, there needs to be the recognition that there is a dual engagement for those in public or social service organizations. We are often engaged with our organizations – many of us have chosen to invest our talents, skills, and abilities in places where we are certainly rewarded with less than the market value for those talents – out of some kind of personal conviction. Now I’m not necessarily claiming that colleagues in for-profit organizations don’t seek some sense of value alignment out of their work (or that all public/social service employees do for that matter), but of all the people I’ve encountered in my life who are dissatisfied with their jobs, I’ve never had t a for-profit professional tell me that they hate their job/who they work with/their boss, want to quit, but stay because they have great customers. I have, however, heard folks in social services articulate their rationale for staying is rooted in relationships with clients, students, or the nature of the work while very thoroughly deconstructing their organization.

Perhaps that is the other side of the coin and calls for research into why disengaged employees remain in positions that leave them utterly uninspired. Granted, fear of change and fear of the market might outweigh their dissatisfaction and disengagement, but it would be an interesting study.

This is all fun stuff, but it begs the question – what engages you? What causes you to disengage? Does the list above resonate? Drop dime.