Why engagement is not enough

You've read the studies that show the strong relationship between employee engagement and business outcomes. Research by HBR, Gallup and others show that “70% of respondents rank employee engagement as very important to achieving overall organizational success” and that “engagement correlates highly with customer experience.” Research shows that companies with highly engaged employees deliver higher Earnings Per Share (EPS), lower Cost of Goods Sold, (CGS) stronger revenues, fewer safety incidents, less theft, lower turnover, and less absenteeism. The list of benefits goes on and on.

So why is engagement not enough? 
 

I’ll explain with an analogy:

We all know that there’s a direct link between losing weight and improving your physical health. The benefits of weight loss are abundantly clear - it reduces the likelihood of heart disease and stroke, reduces blood pressure, lowers body fat, prevents diabetes, and bolsters self-esteem.

Losing weight doesn’t happen by chance – it requires one to reduce their calorie intake, increase the amount of physical activity they do, or both. The amount of weight lost and the speed at which it is lost depends on how much one reduces their calorie intake and how much more time and effort one expends on physical activity. Different combinations will yield different results.

From a formulaic perspective, calorie intake and exercise are the inputs that generate the weight loss outcome, and the weight loss outcome can generate a secondary outcome which is improved physical health. In order to optimize either or both of the outcomes, one must understand what the inputs are, and how increasing or decreasing the inputs will impact the outcome.

Leading and lagging indicators
 

In performance management, the terms “lagging” and “leading” indicators are often used to describe these dependencies. Lagging indicators relate to the “output” of a process, while leading indicators relate to the “inputs” of the process. Lagging indicators are typically easy to measure but hard to improve, while leading indicators are typically harder to measure and easy to influence.

To measure your weight loss progress, you have a simple lagging indicator that’s easy to measure using a bathroom scale. But how do you actually reach your weight loss goal? You need to measure the leading indicators (the inputs) by keeping track of your calorie intake and how much you’re exercising. If your output isn’t changing quickly enough, you can speed it up by adjusting the inputs. The key is to measure both leading and lagging indicators. If you’re only checking the scale and not watching your calories and exercise, you’ll have very little control over the outcome of your efforts.

Engagement is a lagging indicator - easy to measure but hard to influence
 

The same goes for engagement. Measuring engagement is like using the bathroom scale -- in order to be successful, you also need to identify, measure and optimize the inputs. Calories and exercise are like workforce stress and empowerment -- reduce the former and increase the latter, and your engagement levels will improve.

Engagement has been touted as a key workforce health indicator for years because it’s easy to measure – it’s a lagging indicator, after all. But without understanding and measuring the leading indicators of engagement, it’s difficult to improve. Leading indicators of engagement are typically harder to measure, but they’re much easier to influence.

Measure what you can actually influence
 

While some of the most commonly cited factors that drive engagement are probed in engagement surveys, the real drivers are harder to measure. Quantifying positive inputs like empowerment levels, and negative inputs like levels of stress and fatigue, require very different diagnostic tools. As leading indicators though, they are highly predictive of future engagement levels.

Surveys are valuable for multiple reasons, and they're one of the best ways to let your team know that you're listening and that you value their perspective. But rather than measuring engagement, focus on gathering insights that will help you identify, measure, and optimize the inputs of engagement. Not only are leading indicators like empowerment and stress far easier to influence, but you’ll also be measuring and improving things not only that directly impact your employees, management, and executives, but they'll feel the impact of these improvements every single day.

From Alchemy to Psychology: The Elements of Empowerment

Empowerment.  It’s a concept that’s getting a lot of buzz lately, as part of a recent increase in attention on organizational and workforce health.  In fact, empowerment has been linked to some major organizational benefits: high employee empowerment is a predictor of high employee engagement (Jose & Mampilly 2014; Stander & Rothman 2010), which we know is a good predictor of productivity.  If empowerment predicts engagement, it’s possible that empowerment is the key leading indicator organizations have been looking for.  But how exactly are you supposed to find out if your employees are empowered? An empowered workforce is gold for businesses, but figuring out how to measure it can be a difficult process – like making gold from lead. It’s basically alchemy.

Empowerment can be difficult to define, let alone measure: the word empowerment can be used in many different contexts.  Even in the generally accepted context of organizational psychology, empowerment refers to the way(s) in which someone thinks about, understands, and views their role in the workplace – and that’s pretty all-encompassing. 

 So, let’s break this down, with the understanding that measuring empowerment is like performing alchemy.  In alchemy there are four basic elements: air, earth, fire, and water.  Similarly, empowerment can be divided into four elements too: meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact (Spreitzer 1995). 

That is, empowerment is comprised of how a person feels about their work role in terms of:

• whether their role has meaning
• whether they feel competent in their role
• whether they feel that their role allows them some self-determination
• whether they feel they are making an impact

This sounds like a wonderful description of what it means to be empowered, but we are left with the puzzle of breaking down those four elements into something that’s actually actionable.  How do we get the true elemental metals from these broad concepts?

There is a myriad of possible approaches, but let’s zero in on two particularly relevant psychological concepts: locus of control and self-compassion.

Locus of control is the idea that we all feel a certain degree of control over our lives (Thomas & Velthouse 1990).  People with a strong external locus of control feel that events happen to them rather than because of them, and that no matter how they act or what they say, they will have no impact on their current or future circumstances.  Conversely, those with a strong internal locus of control feel that they play an agentive role in their own circumstances – that they have a strong influence on what happens in their lives, and that their actions have tangible and meaningful effects on the world.  

These loci, like most psychological dimensions, exist on a scale; we all possess an external and internal locus of control to some extent.  Many things can influence the relative strengths of a person’s loci of control, including lifestyle and socioeconomic factors that affect the amount of control a person actually has on their life and surroundings. This also means that the strength of each locus can be variable over time as these and other factors change.

It is not surprising that  locus of control has previously been linked to empowerment (Spreitzer 1995).  Those with a strong internal locus of control are likely to feel that their actions have an effect on the world around them – and generally speaking, they’re right.  They feel that they’re able to make an impact in their current role, and that their role allows them some self-determination to choose what their day-to-day existence is like.  That is, we can use locus of control, a concept easily measured by psychologists, as a proxy for elements 3 and 4 of empowerment – impact and self-determination.

Now let’s consider self-compassion.  

Often it is self-esteem rather than self-compassion that is linked to empowerment.  But self-esteem can be problematic; too much focus on liking yourself and comparing yourself to others can mean that measures of high self-esteem are confounded with high levels of narcissism (Neff 2003; Damon 1995; Finn 1990; Seligman et al. 1995).  Narcissists, however, do not necessarily have high levels of empowerment – in fact, there is evidence that they often feel a sense of insecurity and lack of control (Czarna et al. 2014; Campbell & Miller 2011; Miller et al. 2013).

Self-compassion, on the other hand, is what we might actually expect self-esteem to be; it is defined as “being open to and moved by one’s own suffering, experiencing feelings of caring and kindness toward oneself, taking an understanding, nonjudgmental attitude toward one’s inadequacies and failures, and recognizing that one’s own experience is part of the common human experience” (Neff 2003).  Self-compassion is correlated with compassion for others, and as such it is not correlated with being self-absorbed or inconsiderate of others.  It is also not related to self-pity; self-pitying individuals often feel very disconnected from others (Goldstein & Kornfield 1987), while self-compassionate individuals feel a sense of connection to others through a more widespread tendency toward compassion (Neff 2003).  Self-esteem is often fragile in the face of criticism – self-compassion is not (Neff et al. 2007; Neff 2003). 

These findings make self-compassion a very useful tool for the workplace; employees can receive constructive feedback while still maintaining their self-compassion.  Likewise, self-compassion allows an employee to overcome their failures and not be defined by them.  Since self-compassion also helps regulate emotions, it provides people with a sense of stability and agency over their feelings.  Sound familiar?  

Self-compassion allows people to feel competent even when receiving critical feedback, and to feel like their life and work has meaning via a sense of connectedness to their environment.  It allows for a sense of control over feelings and circumstances, giving us insight into people’s sense of self-determination as well.  The concept of self-compassion has also been well-documented and is easily measured by psychologists, so we can use it as a well-founded proxy for elements 1-3 of empowerment.

All these findings give us a great way to make sense of empowerment: by combining measures of self-compassion and locus of control, we have the means to measure the extent to which our employees feel that their role has meaning, that they are competent, that they possess self-determination, and that they are making an impact. 

And that’s one way to turn lead into gold.

Why psychology is replacing personality in the workplace

Over the past few years, people analytics, the practice of using technology to cultivate awareness of the people within an organization, has become the domain of entire departments at many large organizations.

This is not in any way surprising. After all, humans have always tried to understand why we are the way we are – horoscopes, for example, represent some of the earliest efforts in that area. Fortunately, our scientific understanding of the world has improved dramatically since that time, shaping our understanding of people in an evidence-based way. We now have an entire field of study dedicated to, as Wikipedia puts it, “the science of behaviour and mind, including conscious and unconscious phenomena, as well as thought.” This, of course, refers to the scientific discipline of psychology, the goal of which is to understand every aspect of how humans work.

But we can’t expect our people analytics departments to learn everything there is to know about human psychology; even psychologists generally choose one or two subfields to focus on. So how do we narrow it down, especially when it comes to understanding your workforce?

Many organizations have chosen to focus on personality  – a natural choice, since “personality” is usually understood by the general population to mean the sum total of a person’s characteristics. It may feel intuitively like the best place from which to draw actionable insights about your people. This focus has led to a slew of personality assessments tailor-made for HR and people analytics. While not always intended for this use by their creators, many personality frameworks are marketed as an enticing solution for understanding people in your organization: they promise us a quantitative way to neatly and tidily divide a large workforce into smaller, more manageable bins. You can sort your workforce according to their personality “type.” A place for everything, and everything in its place.

There’s one massive problem with this: people aren’t so simple. They don’t fit nicely into boxes.

We cling to these personality tests for the same reason we still read horoscopes; they appeal to our desire to make order out of chaos. We like to have a tidy system of classification. To illustrate, let’s consider one of the most famous personality classification systems: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) classification. The MBTI stands out because not only is it astonishingly popular, but it forces people into boxes while simultaneously claiming not to do so. Based on a series of questions regarding how you feel about certain morals and values, and how you think you would behave in various situations, you are assigned four letters – your “type” – such as ENTJ. Then, of course, you are provided with a description of your own “unique” personality.
But there’s one important detail about the MBTI that makes it difficult to actually use: it isn’t real.

In fact, there is no evidence to support the MBTI at all. A quick Google search will give you a plethora of articles, both academic and vernacular, about the fact that the MBTI actually measures…well, nothing. It’s as ephemeral as a horoscope. And just like a horoscope, MBTI descriptions are general enough to apply to anyone, but flattering enough to make us feel special yet connected to those of the same “sign.”
There are those nice, tidy boxes again.

Personality psychologists have long been advocating for the use of a constellation of scalar measures to understand psychology – combinations of mutable states instead of boxes of fixed traits that people don’t actually fit into. Nuanced, thoughtful approaches to psychology allow us to capture the notion that people can change over time (e.g. overcoming depression), can be different with different groups (e.g. family vs. coworkers), and can change their behaviour in response to external events. Personality tests like the MBTI miss the mark on all these kinds of details, completely failing to capture the nature of human thought and behaviour.

So how does a business incorporate vibrant, dynamic humanity into its people analytics initiatives?

For us, that understanding comes from one of the most unique and fundamental of human characteristics: language. How do you talk when you’re in a meeting with your boss? Is it different from when you’re chatting at home with your spouse? Of course it is. These linguistic differences are measurable – and importantly for businesses, they are actionable. They help us see states instead of traits.

What does your language tell us about your level of stress right now? How has that changed over the last year? What event(s) were any changes associated with? Do you speak differently with different people? How so? By obtaining a multitude of linguistic data, we present a more robust input from which to draw insights, and from which to base crucial organizational and management decisions. Assessing language in this way can provide a strong base from which to help businesses understand where they’re successfully helping employees feel more comfortable, more empowered, and more productive – and it can show where they are failing employees.

Yes, these kinds of analyses require a more careful study of human psychology, but the information they yield is much more valuable. By developing a more dynamic understanding of how to look at people – who we are with our friends, who we are when we argue, who we are when we’re tired, who we are when we write professional memos – we can come away with specific, reliable insights for our people, rather than a vague horoscope reading that forces people into clunky, unwieldy boxes.

Maybe it’s the Taurus in us, but at Receptiviti we would much prefer to understand people through a constellation of data-driven measures than to do so based on constellations in the sky.