On the one hand, bad things happen when you emphasize “employee engagement” — job satisfaction — at your institution. Bad things especially happen if you make engagement really count by, for example, making your managers’ pay turn in part on whether the folks who report to them are engaged.
Suppose you do annual surveys assessing employees’ engagement. If the overall engagement score for people reporting to a particular manager goes up year-over-year, the manager earns more money.
Simple enough.
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The problem is that managers aren’t stupid.
Even bad managers frequently aren’t stupid.
If you consider how a manager has improved the “engagement” score in setting the manager’s compensation, then the manager will surely improve the engagement score.
Maybe not engagement itself. But the engagement score.
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A bunch of managers will tell their folks: “I want you to log in to the ‘engagement survey’ on your computer. Then you can leave the room, and come back in a half hour. After you log in, I’ll just sit down, pretend to be you, and fill in all the scores.”
A bunch of other managers will be more subtle: “I’d like you to take your ‘engagement survey’ now. I’ll just stand here, looking over your shoulder, while you complete the survey. Remember that my pay turns on how you answer those questions.”
Other managers will be more subtle still. They won’t directly try to influence the survey itself. But when they get back reports showing that only 85 percent of their direct reports are engaged, they’ll start to fume: “There’s someone in this room who’s not engaged?!! That’s ridiculous! You should all be engaged. If you’re not engaged, it’s your fault!
“Call Human Resources! I know that we’re supposed to see only anonymous results from the engagement survey. But let’s see if they’ll give me a report that isn’t anonymized. After all, I’m a very important person. If they won’t give me a report with the names revealed, let’s figure out how to break the anonymity some other way. Maybe HR can run reports for different groups of employees, each anonymized, but if I compare the results I can figure out who isn’t engaged. I’ve got to get to the bottom of this. This is outrageous!”
And the next year, mirabile dictu, everybody’s engaged.
It’s remarkable.
On the other hand, good things happen when you emphasize employee engagement. Especially if you make engagement really count, by making managers’ pay depend on it.
First, managers start focusing on engagement. Managers start asking people about their jobs, and what the manager can do to help the employee’s career, and whether there are specific tasks the employee would like to try.
That’s kind of what a manager should be doing.
Second, managers will realize that every vote counts — from the people in relatively high roles (at corporations) or senior associates (at law firms) — to the people in lower roles. In particular, at a law firm, secretaries, IT staff, librarians, and the like are often neglected members of the food chain. If a partner’s pay turns in part on whether the secretary is happy, the partner will suddenly start treating the secretary with more respect.
That’s really not so bad.
Finally, some studies say that increased employee engagement correlates to higher corporate share prices.
I’m a little skeptical of those studies. I don’t know if they tease out all of the confounding factors or if they can really isolate cause and effect.
But I’m ready to believe that, if your firm makes a conscious effort to improve employees’ happiness, you’re likely to end up with happier employees.
The goal is noble, even if the route is difficult.
Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at [email protected].