How to Rock Employee Engagement

Employee engagement needs a new approach: Stop expending so much energy trying to convince disengaged employees to stay. Start focusing on engaged employees — the workhorses and reliable people who drive a business.

It goes against the current of employee engagement to abandon disengaged employees. The HR technology category for employee engagement is estimated to be in excess of $74 billion because companies are trying everything they can to keep employees, reduce employee turnover, and drive productivity. Pulse surveys. Rewards and recognition. Casual learning and skills building. Real-time coaching and feedback. Yet Gallup data comes back year after year showing employee engagement stuck at about 30 percent. We just can’t seem to make everyone happy.

So stop trying to make everyone happy.

Let me put it this way: Disengaged employees have already checked out. They are not the co-workers engaged employees want in the trenches with them day-in and day-out. Engaged workers are the people that other engaged workers and business leaders want on the bus. They are committed, enjoy the work, and want to see the organization thrive — if only management would get rid of the deadbeats. Except, most companies focus on why people might leave a company, monitor flight risks, develop programs, and deploy technology to bolster engagement. The results aren’t matching the intent.

Sure enough, you too might be investing in programs or turning to technology providers to reduce turnover (a high priority in a competitive jobs market that favors candidates). Or you’re trying to show employees you care about them by providing well-being programs and solutions, training and learning opportunities, or development for managers to be better bosses. All great things that will probably improve morale or reduce absenteeism. Ultimately, productivity may even rise. You might even be focusing on the employee experience or creating a stronger workplace culture to attract great talent and elevate your employer brand.

All of the above is driving the employee engagement technology category, attracting the attention of investors who see silver bullets everywhere to the employee engagement conundrum. And yet.

We believe that if we do more to create a better employee experience and support employees in their well-being, career paths, and give them better managerial support, then they’ll be more engaged. Why is it then that employee engagement remains stuck?

Here’s one hypothesis: We should stop focusing on disengaged employees and start looking to engaged employees. Find them, understand them, and hire and keep more people like them. They are committed. They want the organization to succeed. They want to be surrounded by more “all-in” co-workers. And they probably want to stop carrying all the burden of productivity. Heck, they might even be more engaged when they notice that you’ve noticed they are the most important resource the company has.

It’s time to rethink employee engagement. As business and HR leaders, we need to stop putting resources into the people who have already checked out and invest in people who want to stay in their job. It’s a tough thing to say that you’re willing to let people go. But if you’re honest, those disengaged employees are probably not worth the effort and you’d be better off hiring more people like your most engaged employees.

According to a study by Workplace Research Foundation, highly engaged employees are 38 percent more likely to be more productive. We need to do more to find these engaged employees, gather more data around why they are more engaged, and find a way to replicate at scale that engagement. The trick is actually finding them and gathering sufficient data around what makes them tick.

You might provide great pay, great benefits, great programs, and great training that recognize great work or that can advance a person’s career. Yet if you’re doing all that and people still are disengaged, it might not be you.

At which point it’s worth asking: What’s the cost of keeping workers who aren’t committed in terms of productivity and customer dissatisfaction? Perhaps the fight for talent is hurting your bottom line.

Forget tracking disengaged employees. Track engaged employees. The reality is that better workforce analytics — made possible by enterprise technology that captures HR data — can help us find and evaluate engaged employees. It used to be the norm that collecting and analyzing data required a small army of data scientists. However, the digital age and omnipresent technology can help business and HR leaders measure and evaluate engagement, turnover rates, absenteeism rates, where productive employees exist across an organization, and countless other KPIs that matter to organizational success. We now have myriad tools at our disposal, such as long-form surveys, pulse surveys, manager and coaching tools, and workforce data.

Leveraging technology can help us identify and evaluate our engaged employees. We can use those insights to support those people and hire others with their characteristics. The more we focus on engaged employees, the better we’ll become at feeding our talent pipeline and fostering a culture that collectively is more committed to the mission and better business outcomes.

Kiran is the Co-Founder, President and Chief Architect of SplashBI. With over 20 years of industry experience, Kiran has been instrumental in the design, management, and implementation of SplashBI core technologies and business practices. Kiran currently oversees the development, global delivery, and support departments of the company.

Disengaged employees take up a lot of energy and likely bring down morale among other employees (not just because negativity can be infectious but because it’s hard for engaged employees to carry the load of being positive or doing all the work). Engaged employees are high-performers, future leaders, and want the organization to succeed. In fact, engaged employees are all-in and put in discretionary effort because they are committed.

That’s why the answer seems pretty clear: We should invest in our engaged employees — especially considering a disengaged employee can cost about 34 percent of a person’s salary in lost productivity. That’s about the same cost to replace someone. The math, then, is just as clear. Disengaged employees aren’t worth the cost of keeping them, let alone investing in trying to convince them to be more committed.

Now consider data about engaged employees: Companies with engaged employees outperform competitors by as much as 202 percent, according to Dale Carnegie Training. It only makes sense to focus on engaged employees to drive productivity and help organizations take on business challenges.