Know Your Employees, If You Want Them Engaged
ENGAGEMENT IN THE WORKPLACE IMPROVES PERFORMANCE, YET THE DATA ON LEVELS OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ARE DISCOMFORTING. A BOCCONI STUDY SHOWS WHAT COUNTS FOR DIFFERENT GENERATIONS OF WORKERS AND INDICATES THE PATH COMPANIES AND MANAGERS HAVE TO FOLLOWby Beatrice Manzoni, Dept. of Management and Technology, Bocconi
Translated by Alex Foti
What makes people do their best and work toward the achievement of company goals with intensity and dedication? What makes people proud of the work they do? The answer is one and one thing only: engagement with one’s work and organization.
Too bad that people who feel a high level of engagement seem to be very few today. If we read the latest International Engagement Survey results, the percentages are disappointing: more than 85% of people around the world do not seem to be engaged with their jobs. And in Europe the percentage of people who do not feel attached to what they do is even higher than in other areas if the world. Therefore there are many companies undergoing a deep crisis in terms of engagement of their employees, and most of the time they seem unaware of it.
What do we exactly mean by employee engagement? It's more than just personal motivation. An engaged employee is a person who has a deep attachment to his work and his organization, on both a rational and an emotional level. Rationally, engagement allows us to understand how we can contribute to the success of the organization with our work and give context to our role and personal objectives with respect to the objectives of the organization. Emotionally, it makes us passionate about what we do, inspires us to always do our best, and speak well of the organization that employs us.
A high level of engagement produces positive impact on individual effort and performance, and on how well employees talk about their company and their intention to stay with the company. At an organizational level, customer engagement, productivity and profitability improve, while turnover, absenteeism and accidents at work drop.
At this point, it is important for companies and managers to understand how they can improve the level of involvement of their employees and keep it high and constant over time. We try to do this in a recent research project at Bocconi developed in collaboration with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Our findings are that there does not seem to be any significant difference in terms of engagement between various generations at work, i.e. we cannot say that Millennials are less engaged than previous generations. So the clichés about Millennials falling in love and falling out with a company with the same ease, or Baby Boomers being tired of working, are not true.
However, what differs are the elements creating engagement for people belonging to different generations. For Millennials and GenXers, it matters much more than for other generations to do a job that makes sense and has an impact. At Facebook, they recently arrived at a similar conclusion: those leaving Facebook (and not only them) quit because their work is not interesting, does not value individual skills, and gives no prospects for advancement. What then Facebook did was to teach managers to design jobs that could provide a strong sense of meaning to people. The fact of receiving feedback from the employer about your job has a strong impact on the engagement of Millennials, which is not observed in other generations.
Another interesting message emerges from the study: what companies offer their collaborators doesn’t count, if they don’t keep the promises made. Breaking promises in terms of content and meaning of the job has a negative impact on the engagement of Millennials and Generation X. GenXers’ engagement, however, is also negatively influenced by the failure of keeping promises in terms of occupational safety. For Baby Boomers, the factors are still different: disengagement is created if (compared to expectations) there is less socialization in the workplace and more emphasis (still with respect to expectations) on performance and results linked to a mechanism of variable compensation. What practical conclusions should companies and managers draw? If you want to increase the engagement of your employees, invest time to know them in terms of their expectations and professional values; build job positions and roles that deeply make sense for people, and above all keep the promises made and meet the expectations about what really matters to the people working for you.
