How to Engage Your Employees
Searching for the Ties that Bind: How to Engage Your Employees
Article by Dr. John E. Kello
One of the “high sizzle” concepts in the field of organizational science is employee engagement. The basic idea is that employees who are deeply involved with and personally committed to their organization do a lot of good for the organization. They perform well, they are dependable, they go beyond the mere requirements of the job, they coach and mentor others voluntarily, they build teamwork, and they contribute in a major way to the spread of positive morale where they work.
There is reason to think that some of us just by nature are more prone to be engaged people. Some of us are positive in our outlook, coaches and helpers, conscientious, achievement-oriented. That’s who we are, and we bring that with us wherever we go. We are the folks that others want “on their bus”.
There is, by the same token, reason to think that some of us live at the other end of the scale. We are wired to be more pessimistic, cynical, “do-only-what-it-takes” kinds of people. Some of us are on the bus too.
There is good reason to think that most of us fall in between these two extremes, neither universally positive and committed nor universally negative and unplugged. For the great majority of us, whether we lean toward the positive or negative pole at work depends greatly on “the deal” we get there. Most of us are not wired to be sunny no matter what, or rainy no matter what, and so our current conditions and forecast depend overwhelmingly on our relationship with our organization. More specifically still, our attitude depends most critically on our relationship with our immediate manager.
Years ago, the Gallup organization developed a simple 12-item survey scored on a 5-point scale to assess individuals’ level of engagement at work. The underlying facets of the concept become clear when examining the following questions:
Do you know what is expected of you at work?
Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?
At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
At work, do your opinions seem to count?
Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
Do you have a best friend at work?
In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
How Engaged are Employees?
What do you think you find when you give the survey to a large sample of employees? That is what Gallup does, among other things, and Gallup’s comprehensive 2020 survey of 112,312 business units support an interesting conclusion. The percentage of employees who report being “actively engaged” in their jobs (highly involved, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace) was 36 percent. So, slightly more than one-third of those surveyed report that they are plugged in, giving it their all, and providing the company with all those highly valued benefits in productivity, morale, teamwork, etc. If there is good news in this outcome, it is that the percentage of actively engaged is not lower. A related bright side is that many of those actively engaged are almost surely middle-of-the-roaders who are being well led and inspired by their boss and their company. I seriously doubt that as many as 36 percent of us are hard-wired to actively engage and bring 100 percent of ourselves to work every day, no matter what the day, no matter what the work. There is just not that much unconditional optimism out there!
At the other end of the scale, the percentage of employees who report being “actively disengaged” in their jobs was 14 percent. The good news, perhaps, is that the number of these on-the-payroll-sleepwalkers isn’t larger. The bad news is, I seriously doubt that between one-in-ten and one-in-five of us in the workplace is hard-wired to be miserable, disgruntled and actively, vocally spread our unhappiness to colleagues. Some of that number are almost certainly one-time middle-of-the-roaders who have been poisoned by toxic relations with their boss and/or their company. Whether born or made, some of those unplugged chair-fillers can’t or won’t come back to the light.
Note that more recent, current data up through 2024 are not much different from the 2020 data. In fact they are worse, showing modest declines in Actively Engaged and modest increases in Actively Disengaged. Oh my.
The percentage of employees in the middle in most of the surveys, i.e., neither engaged nor disengaged, is around 50 percent. What a mixed result! At least they are not morale and productivity saboteurs (at least not yet). But half the workforce is just “sort of there,” in and out of their work, bringing less – in some cases much less – than they are capable of bringing to work each day. They are making no major investment there.
Based on my experience in working with a wide range of industries, I must confess that I am not greatly surprised by those results. Nothing in my personal experience would cause me to challenge them. Long before I ever heard of the concept of employee engagement, I used to “take the temperature” of new client companies by asking lots of folks at various levels of the organization a question like this: “Considering people here are capable of doing, what percentage do they actually do on a daily basis?” Across that wide range of industries, average responses were in the 30 – 50 percent range; there were exceptions (both high and low), but most fell in that low-mid range. In the same vein I am reminded of the corny old joke, which I have recently seen again in the research on employee engagement:
Q: “How many people work here?”
A: “About half, maybe less.”
Building Engagement
So, as a practical matter, where do we go from here? What is an organization that wants a high level of employee engagement to do?
Look back at the Gallup questions. If you read between the lines just a bit, you will see that the questions cover the fundamentals of a well-led organization. Do you have the tools and the information and the direction and the sense of empowerment to do your best job? Are you cared for and treated like an important, respected, and valued member of the team? Are you given developmental opportunities, and recognized for your contributions?
Note too that the questions don’t deal with “how are you wired?”, “what’s your attitude?” They don’t address your traits, dispositions, or built-in characteristics. They are not personality assessment questions. They deal with how you are led and managed and what the work climate around you is like. They address the situation you work in, not the person you are. They relate ultimately to the culture of the organization you are in, but they start with your immediate working conditions.
The strong implication is that whatever wiring you have, the environment at work can pull most folks up or down on the engagement scale. Who has the most pull? No big surprise here! It is that frontline of leadership again – the first-line supervisor, or foreman, or lead man. If your organization attends well to the selection and training and development of those high-impact positions, they in turn can build a high-engagement organization around them.
What is a realistic goal? In the field of organizational effectiveness, there is a very rough rule of thumb that I think applies here. It is the 10-80-10 rule. The claim is that 10 percent of the population, for whatever reason will do their very best regardless of the situation they are in and regardless of how they are led. They will accept change, work in teams, take on safety coordinator roles, go out of their way to help new employees, etc. Another 10 percent won’t sign on, no matter what. They want to come to work, do what they’re told, get a paycheck, and go home. They don’t want any more involvement. The critical assumption of the 10-80-10 rule is that the 80 percent in the middle can be made to look and act like the upper 10 percent or the lower 10 percent -- depending on how they are led.
As a behavioral scientist I confess freely that this is all anecdotal. There are no hard data, as far as I know, that support the 10-80-10 rule, and surely the percentages of my three-category scheme would vary from one work setting to the next. But in the scores of workplaces that I have first-hand knowledge of, it roughly fits.
I have suggested many times that the frontline leader is crucial to the success of our productivity, quality, and safety efforts. Here I suggest that this critical resource has an even deeper and wider impact on the overall effectiveness, and indeed the very heart, of our organizations. To the extent supervisors are engaged – chosen well and led well themselves – they in turn will build employee engagement, by example, by expectation, and overall by the way they treat their people. They will do their part to contribute to an overall culture of excellence.