Employee Engagement Research & Sources
If you’ve read any form of leadership literature over the past year there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the epidemic that is sweeping the globe, and has been for some time. No country is safe – whether it is a first world country with all the benefits a person could want, or a third world country where workers are truly exploited.
That epidemic is employee engagement.
Low engagement across the world in what should be a meaningful endeavor – work, has strangled productivity and is robbing employees around the world of their energy and happiness. You see, it’s only in the last 100 years that work has really been separate from the management and planning. And that separation has led to meaningless work, separated from the customers who benefit or the outcomes they produce.
Now more than 70% of employees, even in first world countries, are disengaged in their work.
I’ve put together a manifesto with a clear step-by-step guide to improving employee engagement, and below are the sources for research that all point to the same thing: We crave clarity, regular checking in from our leaders where they focus on our strengths, and continuous improvement, and despite what you may have experienced the meaning we can get from normal every day jobs runs very deep.
Let’s check it out!
- The State of the Global Workplace, Gallup
- Growth Mindset
- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
- Hertzberg’s Two Factor Theory
- Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world
- High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being
- Eustress versus Distress
- Harvard Forces of Employee Engagement
- Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation
- SWOT Analysis For Management Consulting (Albert Humphrey)
- Do Employees Really Know What’s Expected of Them? Gallup
- The Million Dollar Checklist: Sustaining reductions in catheter related bloodstream infections
- The Person and the Situation – effects of environment on motivation
- Universal and Cultural Dimensions of Optimal Experiences
- Motivating Language Theory
- The Art of Motivating Employees
- Driving Engagement by Focusing on Strengths
- Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance
- Harvard, The Easiest Way To Change People’s Behavior
- Timing Matters: The Impact of Immediate and Delayed Feedback on Learning
- The Power of Feedback
- Google’s research on Clarity and Meaning
First, the statistics on the current engagement epidemic.
1. The State of the Global Workplace, Gallup
What is it?
Every few years the Gallup Business Journal releases the “State of The Global Workplace”, on how employees view their job. In 2013 they reviewed responses from over 30 million employees and found a staggering 87% of people are not engaged in their work. In fact, 18% are actively disengaged, causing potential harm to the company and others.
In the US and Canada, two fully developed countries, employee engagement is still only around 31%, leaving 69% of employees disengaged. That means two out of three people you work with are not engaged in their work, and are more likely to drag their feet and cause mistakes.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
Business units whose employees are engaged see 17% higher productivity, and 21% higher profit than business units whose employees are disengaged. They see 19% higher sales, and 41% fewer mistakes or defects in their work. The research found companies with highly engaged employees also outperform others by 147% in earnings per share.
Sources: http://www.gallup.com/file/services/176708/State_of_the_American_Workplace_, https://www.gallup.com/services/190118/engaged-workplace.aspx
2. Growth Mindset
What is it?
The “Growth Mindset” has changed the way people, and teachers in particular, look at others’ ability to learn and perform over time.
Carol Dweck is the professor of psychology at Stanford University and studied children in a wide range of settings. She found that those students who were happy to make mistakes “because they learned something from it” far outperformed students who believed their intelligence was fixed, where they could either do something or they couldn’t.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
What this means is that given the right situation people can learn, change, become better and grow. Carol found you can change your intelligence and your outcomes when you approach your intelligence as able to grow (a growth mindset), rather than just being “fixed”. This means your team can also learn the strategies to bring engagement and meaning to their work, learn to improve themselves, and learn to improve the work itself.
Source: https://www.stem.org.uk/system/files/community-resources/2016/06/DweckEducationWeek.pdf
3. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
What is it?
Most people would be familiar with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in some form or another. He found that people are motivated by the needs they have in an order similar to a pyramid. First, people seek to meet their basic needs like food, water, and shelter. Then we look for personal safety, emotional safety and financial well-being. Once those are taken care of, people look to higher needs like social belonging, raising their self-esteem and finding meaning and self-actualization.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
We need to know this because our people, our teams and employees will always seek to meet their basic needs first. That means if they do not feel safe in their job it’s unlikely they’ll be able to move on to making progress in meaningful work, as they’ll be stuck continuously trying to find safety instead. This can be the result of job insecurity, not being paid enough, or having an unstable boss.
The Employee Engagement model ticks all the boxes in providing this safety and then meaning in one’s work, by first tackling basic financial needs, then ensuring our team are informed, catch up regularly, have clarity on their work, and improve their own skills (providing more likelihood of a role at another company even if a job disappears).
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
4. Hertzberg’s Two Factor Theory:
What is it?
Frederick Herzberg found, similarly to Maslow, that people tended to meet their basic needs before being able to meet higher needs. The basic needs he termed “Hygiene Factors” – in the same way that we need to brush our teeth, sleep and shower every day. Those factors for Herzberg were things like status, job security, salary, fringe benefits, and general work conditions.
The higher order needs he termed Motivators, and those were things like having challenging work, gaining recognition for one’s achievement, responsibility, the opportunity to do something meaningful, and involvement in decision making.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
Once Herzberg’s basic needs were met, it was the motivators that provided the real impact to employee engagement, and as a result the extra discretionary effort and improved profitability of a company. The employee engagement model of Clarity, Checking in, and Continuous Improvement also matches up with this theory by naturally providing Motivators like clarity, recognition, responsibility and meaningful work.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory
5. Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world
What is it?
Researchers Andrew T. Jebb, Louis Tay, Ed Diener & Shigehiro Oishi found in a sample of 1.7 million workers that employees’ emotional wellbeing increased as they were paid more, but only up to around 75,000 a year. After that point happiness did not increase with rates of pay. People who earned $95,000 a year or more had emotional wellbeing and also reached a stage where they evaluated their life more.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
This again matches up with Maslow and Herzberg’s theories, but links the results directly to money and an actual amount. This means it is important to take care of the basic factors in a job before moving on to methods that will motivate them. If a job is well below the $75,000 threshold, you can still increase engagement using the Engagement Model but addressing the money will help too.
Sources: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0277-0, http://money.com/money/5157625/ideal-income-study/
6. High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being
What is it?
Researchers Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of around $75,000. They also found that low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
This research again proves the “hygiene factors” as they relate to pay and money, and give them an actual dollar figure to work with. But it also shows that lower income can exacerbate personal troubles too – troubles that will distract workers from their task and make it less likely for them to get into a flow state while at work.
Once these hygiene factors are taken care of, employees are free to focus on improvement, productivity, meaningful work and mastery – the things that truly bring them engagement and bring companies profit.
Source: https://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489
7. Eustress versus Distress
What is it?
Understanding that there are two types of stress is important to motivating your team. Eustress, or positive stress occurs when the gap between what one has and what one wants is slightly pushed, but not overwhelmed, and there are clear steps to achieve what they need. For example you can see the finish line, you know how you will get there, and all you have to do is go for it.
Distress on the other hand, occurs when a person feels they are being pushed but have a lack of control over how (or whether) they can get there. Distress is common in the current workplace and may lead to anxiety, withdrawal, and depressive behaviour.
Why is this important to Employee Engagement?
Knowing one of the major causes of disengagement in your teams is important. The Engagement Model addresses common “distress” in a wonderful way, by providing clarity, ensuring tasks meet their skill level, checking in to make sure everything is OK and focusing on improving themselves and their tasks.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustress
8. Harvard Forces of Employee Engagement
What is it?
A review of 40,000 healthcare workers in a joint effort from Towers Watson and the Harvard School of Public Health showed the top reasons impacting Employee Engagement included:
- Senior management’s sincere interest in employee well-being
- Opportunities for employees to develop new knowledge/skills
- Organizational commitment to rapid resolution of customer concerns
- Appropriate decision-making authority so employees can perform jobs well
- Employees’ success at improving their skills and capabilities over the last year
- Ability to impact quality of work/product/service
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
To say this matches up with the Engagement Model is an understatement, where having enough impact to do a good job, progress or improvement, and a supervisor who genuinely cared made a big difference.
Source: https://www.towerswatson.com/DownloadMedia.aspx?media=%7BE87F6E65-99E6-413B-8068-09B6821FA7BF%7D
9. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation
What is it?
Richard Ryan & Edward Deci found in their ground-breaking research that there were certain things that increased “intrinsic motivation”, the type of motivation that came from within oneself. Having choice, acknowledgment of feelings, and opportunities for self-direction were found to enhance a person’s intrinsic motivation because they allowed them a greater feeling of autonomy.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
Ryan and Deci’s research matches clearly with the Engagement Model. Having choice – we ensure leaders create goals and steps collaboratively with their team members. Acknowledgement of feelings – when checking in, leaders show empathy when things are hard, praise when things are good, and help remove blockers. And opportunities for self-direction – in working with the team to improve the work itself, and their broader skill-set, they are able to direct themselves and work towards mastery of the task and themselves.
All of this is built in to the Engagement Model, and this is why it provides such a huge, fast impact on the culture of your team.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11392867
10. SWOT Analysis For Management Consulting (Albert Humphrey)
What is it?
SWOT Analysis was created by Albert Humphrey from his research at Stanford during 1960 to 1970. After consulting to dozens of major businesses he found that the gap between what could be achieved by executives and what they did achieve was 35%, and that setting clear outcomes collaboratively with their teams was the key to reducing that gap.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
Clarity again comes up as an important piece of the work-life puzzle, and especially the way the Engagement Model recommends in setting goals collaboratively with your team. It reduces confusion, assists in autonomy and mastery and according to the father of SWOT analysis, improves results.
Source: https://www.sri.com/sites/default/files/brochures/dec-05.pdf
11. Do Employees Really Know What’s Expected of Them?
What is it?
During Gallup’s study of employees they found that only about half (50%) of employees clearly knew what was expected of them at work.
Employees who didn’t know what was expected of them were also 34% more likely to be disengaged.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
Clarity again shows its importance, where the need is clear as employees actually don’t know what is expected of them at work, and those without clarity are more likely to be disengaged. It also matches up with Mihaly’s Flow model.
Sources: https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/195803/employees-really-know-expected.aspx, https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/186164/employees-don-know-expected-work.aspx
12. The Million Dollar Checklist: Reducing catheter related infections in ICUs
What is it?
Peter Pronovost worked with Michigan intensive Care units to reduce infections that often led to death when inserting a catheter. By introducing a checklist of things to do when inserting a catheter (things like washing their hands before inserting a line, cleaning the patient’s skin with antisceptic, etc). Peter and his team reduced infections from 2.7 per 1000 to 0, saving around $175 million.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
Giving people clarity doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it should be simple. But it also shouldn’t be “dehumanising”. A checklist, in this example, simply made big mistakes less likely – it didn’t take away from the task.
Source: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa061115
13. The Person and the Situation – Food Drive Success with Clear Steps
What is it?
The situation, environment or ease of doing something matters more than a person’s predisposition to doing it. In the book, “The Person and the Situation”, Newton, Griffin and Ross performed an experiment where they had two groups of college students – those predisposed to giving and those who were most unlikely to give. Then they asked each group to donate to a food drive, with one twist – some students they just asked to donate, and the others they asked to donate but with specific instructions (where to go, a map, the type of food, and the likely time they would come).
Students’ predispositions did not matter in the end, as it was the group who were given clarity (whether they were likely to give or not) who ended up donating more than anyone else.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
The simple concept of clarity is raised yet again, as we find that it doesn’t matter “what kind of person you are” normally, with the right steps and clarity involved people of all types are more likely to get things done, have success, build self-esteem, increase engagement and tap into discretionary effort as a result.
Source: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015071887850;view=2up;seq=150
14. Universal and Cultural Dimensions of Optimal Experiences
What is it?
The Flow State is when you lose yourself in the task, and things flow effortlessly. You may have experienced this before doing something you love, when you look up and suddenly five hours have passed, or somehow it’s 2am in the morning. You lost track of time because you experienced flow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with Kiyoshi Asakawa released a study outlining the key things most often in place when a person experienced the flow state. Those were:
- When the person knew what to do every step of the way,
- The person could tell clearly and immediately if he/she had made a mistake, and;
- The skills of the person were more or less in balance with the challenges that the activity provided.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
We see clarity and feedback / checking in as important parts, and knowing all these steps we can use them to engineer Flow in our team’s work, increasing the likelihood that their motivation will come from the task itself, not extrinsic motivators like perks and money.
Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jpr.12104
15. Motivating Language Theory:
What is it?
Researchers Jaqueline and Milton Mayfield found three things in common with leaders’ abilities to improve employee motivation, and it stemmed from their language. They found that leaders who spoke with the following were more likely to improve the results of their teams:
- Uncertainty reducing language – clear steps and directions for their teams
- Empathetic language – acknowledgment when things are hard, and praise when things went well
- Meaning-making language – ties task to broader meaning, explains company culture and reason for existence (their “why”)
Why is this important to Employee Engagement?
Knowing these three ways to motivate your teams will improve your leaders, the discretionary effort and the output of your teams. These actions are built into the Engagement Model through clarity, checking in, and tying tasks to meaning.
Sources: http://uthscsa.edu/Gme/documents/EffectsofLeaderMotivatingLanguage.pdf, https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-science-of-pep-talks
16. The Art of Motivating Employees
What is it?
A study from Wharton University found ways to bring meaning to employees’ work. When employees in a donation collection call center were allowed to speak directly with recipients of the donations they collected, collections tripled.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
Matching tasks to a greater meaning is already a part of the Engagement Model. By connecting your team to the outcomes of their work – the customers who benefit – their motivation, engagement and discretionary effort will increase.
Source: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/putting-a-face-to-a-name-the-art-of-motivating-employees/
17. Driving Engagement by Focusing on Strengths
What is it?
Gallup Business Journal released the results of their study on managers’ effect on their staff. Leaders who checked in with their employees at least once a week and focused on their strengths saw 27% higher engagement than managers who did not check in with their staff. In fact, employees in the “ignored” category, where supervisors never checked in had an engagement rate of just half a percent (0.5%).
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
Seeing such a direct impact on engagement through this study from Gallup is enough to make it meaningful. Focusing on strengths, or matching employee’s skill level to the task level, is also a key element in finding the state of “Flow” in a task (according to Csikszentmihalyi).
The Engagement Model embeds this into your leaders’ routines effortlessly, with step two of three being to check in with your employees at least weekly, and match their skills to their tasks.
Source: https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/124214/driving-engagement-focusing-strengths.aspx
18. The Progress Principle and Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance
What is it?
Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer found in their study of employees’ journal entries for a prolonged period that it wasn’t money, perks or time-off that contributed to their happiness. It was a sense of progress, specifically progress in meaningful work.
People were also 50% more likely to have creative ideas on the days they reported their most positive moods.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
Ensuring a sense of progress to facilitate deep employee motivation and happiness will also drive discretionary effort.
Checking in on a task’s progress, and making progress visible for your employee (and team) to see are low cost and high return ways to boost engagement.
Sources: https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins, https://hbr.org/2007/05/inner-work-life-understanding-the-subtext-of-business-performance
19. Harvard, the Easiest Way to Change People’s Behavior
What is it?
Multiple studies demonstrated through Peter Bregman’s article that show the easiest way to change people’s behavior is to change the environment to make the thing you want easier to do.
One study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that the closer teens live to places where alcohol is sold, the greater likelihood they will binge drink and drive under the influence. Even though parents, schools, and advertisements tell teens not to drink, if the liquor store is within walking distance of where the teens live (about half a mile) they will be far more likely to drink, and drive drunk.
The book Mindless Eating gave more examples: if you use a big spoon, you’ll eat more. If you serve yourself on a big plate, you’ll eat more. If you move the small bowl of chocolates on your desk six feet away you’ll eat half as much. If you have a bowl of soup that never gets less than half full, you’ll eat more.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
If you want less stress for your people in getting them to do the things you need, make that thing easier for them to do.
The Engagement Model touches on this in multiple ways – it starts by providing clarity, then makes improvement of the task (and improvement of the broader skillset) a focus. Reducing the steps to a person getting what they want becomes the goal, and the task becomes the motivator, developing intrinsic motivation and autonomy.
Source: https://hbr.org/2009/03/the-easiest-way-to
20. Timing Matters: The Impact of Immediate and Delayed Feedback on Learning
What is it?
Bertram Opitz, Nicola Ferdinand and Axel Mecklinger found that immediate feedback increases results. When dealing with a complex task such as learning a new language or recognising patterns, participants performed between five and 14% better when feedback was immediate, as opposed to feedback that was delayed by a few seconds.
The researchers found it was because people had to hold more information in their working memory, before feedback was given.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
If performance is reduced with feedback delayed by only a few seconds, imagine the damage you are doing to your team if you delay feedback by weeks or months? Not to mention the additional stress, or cognitive load they have to bear.
Make feedback as close as possible to the time and place it occurs for the best results.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3034228/
21. The Power of Feedback
What is it?
John Hattie and Helen Timperley found in their comprehensive review of giving feedback that there were a few things that did not work. Giving rewards or punishments to coerce behavior, and giving negative feedback did not enable people or change their behavior.
Instead they found that positive feedback (what can be done about a situation) in the form of improving a specific task or reaching a specific goal had the most desired effect on behavior.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
So many times leaders give negative feedback to people, accompanied by no clear direction. It may seem obvious to some that this reduces engagement and their feeling of control, but now the research back it up.
By focusing on clarity of exactly how to improve performance or results for a task, and using the “ham sandwich” approach to feedback (something good, feedback to improve, then something good again)
Source: http://www.columbia.edu/~mvp19/ETF/Feedback.pdf
22. Google’s Five Keys to a Successful Team
What is it?
Google’s People Operations (HR) analysed more than 250 team attributes across more than 180 active teams over a period of more than two years. What they found contradicted the accepted knowledge that you need to have super-powered people, engineers or PhDs on your team for it to be high-performing. Instead, they found the best high performing teams all had these traits in common. They had:
- Psychological safety, where team-mates can take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed.
- Dependability, where team-mates can depend on each other to do high quality work, on time (also see “The Ideal Team Player”, by David McLachlan)
- Structure & clarity, with clear goals, roles and execution plans.
- Meaning, working on something that is personally important.
- Impact, believing that the work matters.
Why is it important to Employee Engagement?
These are things that you, as a leader, can do today to help your team enjoy their work. Bringing clarity through clear outcomes and clear steps to get there, giving a higher meaning to the work, and checking in regularly as a team to improve visibility of the work and dependability don’t cost anything to do, but bring huge rewards in Employee Engagement, improved sales, productivity and happiness.
Source: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/