HR professionals have been talking about employee engagement for years, but recent trends have made the topic increasingly frustrating.
Gallup survey results published earlier this year showed that fewer than one-third of employees, 32%, said they felt engaged by their work in 2022, down from 34% in 2021. This after 2021 saw the engagement figure decline from 36% in 2020, which the polling organization said was the first annual decline in engagement in a decade.
Those findings occurred against a backdrop of rumblings about “quiet quitting,” in which employees commit to doing the bare minimum and otherwise check out of work. The term represents a frame of mind with deep roots, yet one that has been fanned by a talent market in flux and rising levels of burnout.
Given the circumstances, employers need to fundamentally rethink what employee engagement means, according to Davis M. Robinson, president and CEO of Kentucky-based Horizon Consulting Services. During a presentation Monday at the Society for Human Resource Management’s Talent Conference, Robinson said employers should focus on strategies that emphasize employees’ strengths and goals rather than those that aim to keep them happy enough to stay.
“We pay a lot of money and a lot of attention to engagement in our organizations, but for some reason, the needle is not moving,” Robinson said. “The numbers are not good. They’re stagnant.”
Robinson showed attendees an ad from automaker Audi in which an employee leaves their job after being named employee of the year. For Robinson, the takeaway is that all of the typical engagement-focused perks on display — awards, free food, clean offices and visible recognition from co-workers — are not enough to keep top talent from leaving.
Finding the right focus
Defining an engagement strategy begins with understanding the spectrum of employees in the organization, Robinson said, including those who are already considered engaged, the actively disengaged and the “nonengaged.” It’s this latter group of workers employers should focus on, Robinson continued, because employers can help create a psychological attachment to the job that these workers may presently lack.
Robinson called back to three psychological conditions of engagement articulated in a 1990 article by Boston University psychologist William Kahn: meaningfulness, safety and availability.
Employers can focus on the first of these, Robinson said, by ensuring employees feel they receive a return on investment from the work they put into their jobs, find meaning in that work and are able to use their strengths on the job.
“Most engagement models are centered around the work experience and not the employees,” he continued. “Instead of organizations focusing on the inputs of the organization, we need to focus on the inputs of the individual.”
Engagement strategies throughout the job cycle
That work begins at the hiring stage, Robinson said, during which employers should consider how they review candidates and whether their hiring processes ask about candidates’ talents, strengths or skills. It’s important, he added, to think about skills that organizations can teach versus those they can’t, particularly skills that relate back to a candidate’s own personality.
Managers play an important role once an employee is onboarded, Robinson said, and their conversations with employees should include direct questions about their strengths and whether those strengths are being utilized. Examples include:
- If you were to quit today, what would you do? How does that relate to your role right now?
- Are you able to utilize those strengths in your current role?
- How did you get into this field?
- What are your natural abilities or talents?
- What is it about your job that satisfies you?
These same question categories could be included in employee engagement surveys, too, Robinson said.
Career pathing is a commonly referenced engagement strategy in HR circles, and Robinson said redesigning or crafting roles can ensure employees are more closely connected to their roles. There also may be opportunities to weave in work with affinity groups, employee resource groups, community groups and other causes to help employees fulfill their goals.
