Culture, Communication and Caring:
Still the Biggest Triggers for Employee Engagement
By Ron Ausmus, Integrity Associates

It has become a truism that employee loyalty and engagement took a permanent hit with all the reengineering and downsizing of the past two decades. No one is predicting a big turnaround, and few are even talking about any route to measurable improvement. The level of job insecurity in the American workforce remains high as mergers and acquisitions continue to proliferate.

The standard assumption is that younger generations of workers have been permanently inoculated against any fresh outbreaks of the engagement and loyalty virus by those overpowering lessons: “Don’t attach yourself too firmly with any organization. They all see you as an expense item—you’re totally expendable!”

These running deficits in loyalty and engagement are a concern to corporate leaders and HR professionals. Business success is dependent on maintaining a stable, committed workforce in the face of global competition. But leaders complain that they’re facing this “engagement malaise” amidst bigger financial constraints to improving the usual incentives of better pay, perks and bonuses. Another ominous element is the looming departure of Baby Boomers, with high-value skills and experience, and loyalty that’s near-absolute. Color in the spectacle of this large segment being replaced by younger generations whose ambivalent attitude toward commitment is celebrated in TV shows and agonized over in popular and professional literature. The prognosis for improvements in loyalty and engagement seems rather bleak.

Like all sweeping generalizations, this one about the intractable state of employee commitment can certainly be challenged. Various business and professional groups have studied this issue at length. Their work quantifies the extent of the problem and yields some interesting insights into the current state of employee motivation and engagement.

There’s plenty of evidence that low levels of employee commitment is a problem. Research by the Gallup Organization affirms that fully 55 percent of all U.S. employees are not engaged at work, and are basically in a holding pattern. They estimate that this comes at a cost to the US economy of $350 billion per year. Other studies illustrate some new “norms” for goofing off and time-wasting. According to a Salary.com-aol survey, the average worker—net of lunch and regular breaks, admits to squandering 2.09 hours of the balance of a regular 8-hour work day. Other estimates put that proportion as high as 40% of the time. Microsoft mounted a worldwide survey of over 38,000 employees, who admitted that they average only three productive days per week. And fully 70 percent of internet pornography is consumed during regular office hours.

Alongside these self-reports of declining productivity, there’s also evidence that the general level of job satisfaction is on the decline. According to a report by the Conference Board, job satisfaction dropped from 60% in mid-90’s to about 50% in 2005. Fully 40% feel disconnected from their employers, and 25% are just showing up for a paycheck. The Office, a popular network TV program, generates comedic entertainment from all the ways that disaffected workers are “checking out” while on the clock and payroll.

Discretionary Effort is Key

This picture of soft attitudes toward diligence clashes with other reports that workers are increasingly overwhelmed with big workloads in the aftermath of mergers and down-sizing. A common litany is how companies keep loading up their demoralized survivors with more job responsibilities without additional pay. This paradox has dusted off the term, “discretionary effort,” first coined some eighty years ago in the early days of industrial psychology. In the late 1920s Harvard’s Elton Mayo first attempted to assess the relationship between motivation and productivity at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company. This pioneering study also coined the term, “Hawthorne effect” well known to any grad student: In Mayo’s study, the job performance of those employees kept improving—not because of any of the intervening variables, but rather because the employees were being carefully studied!

Discretionary effort is defined as the difference between the minimum level of effort necessary, and that level of which workers are in fact capable. In practical terms it means the extent to which some employees are inspired to go above and beyond the norms, and stretch themselves in service to their organization’s goals and challenges. Like discretionary spending, it is completely a matter of choice.

Performance consultant Emma Hammer puts the baseline minimum effort an employee needs to sustain to keep from being fired at around 30%. She found that top performers, over time, regularly maintained upper limits in the 80% range. That’s a very significant difference, further illustrating the gap between those who squander several hours a day on gossip and office politics, and others who stretch themselves to meet and exceed ever-rising expectations of customers or their high-spirited work teams. Simple math suggests that one highly engaged employee puts forth an effort equal to about three of those just getting by with the minimums.

Given the litigious character of the US labor environment, it’s safe to assume that this wide spectrum of engagement is found among workers in all companies. Hundreds of them have subjected their employees to restructuring, merging and de-merging, right-sizing, out-sourcing and co-sourcing. Assuming those structural changes can have similar unsettling effects on all workers, key questions emerge: What accounts for the differences in discretionary effort? What are the factors that are most influential in producing the highest levels of employee engagement?

The best evidence suggests that self-interest-type elements have a high impact on employee loyalty, but are not nearly as influential in terms of employees’ levels of commitment and effort on the job. It’s no surprise that workers make stay-or-leave decisions based on items like pay, benefits, promotions, job resources, assignments, development opportunities, etc. This simply follows Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and companies must stay competitive in those areas. But extra investments there won’t buy much by way of additional effort. Far more influential are the emotional connections that influence engagement—the extent to which employees are emotionally committed and believe in their work, their organizations, teams and managers. The emotional influences in general show about three to four times more impact on employee engagement.

Busiest Employees Actually Happier

The impact of some really basic aspects of emotional engagement is born out in the area of work load and job satisfaction. The busiest employees were found to be the happiest, according to a survey by Sirota Consulting, LLC. More than 800,000 employees at 61 organizations worldwide were surveyed, and those with “too much work” had an overall job satisfaction rating 8 points higher than employees admitting that their workload was too light. Those with the heavier workloads were found to be more positive. They judged themselves to be worthy of the responsibility, and to have high value to the organization. Other research in call centers—an industry noted for high turnover—shows similar results. Reps who handle longer, more complex calls have higher levels of job satisfaction and lower turnover.

Much has been written about the engagement and proficiency of employees at innovative start-up companies. Everyone feels excitement at being a part of something new and special, so they contribute to high levels of cohesion and output. It’s not unusual for start-ups to rank high on annual “best workplaces” listings. Google is one celebrated recent example. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have created a high-spirited organization at the cutting edge of innovation and high employee performance. As Google expands and matures, they’ll likely face the same challenges as dothe more established companies, in maintaining a highly engaged workforce and climate.

Other organizations have produced extraordinary levels of engagement during a particularly challenging phase, such as a big short-fall that has them fighting for their very survival. When the wolf is at the door, employees’ energies become more focused and teamwork can be exceptional, as pettiness is sidelined in favor of a maximum group effort. Such pressure tends to focus the heart and mind. The company folklore gets a boost; there’s more open talk of the company’s virtues, values and positives amidst the looming threat of extinction at the hands of their perceived inferior competitors in the industry.

Absent those extremes, leaders in mature companies in the middle of the curve wonder how they can create a similar sense of urgency to generate higher levels of discretionary effort. That seems to be a major focus of many performance consultants, who book big fees helping C-level executives orchestrate some urgent new challenge or timetable to elicit a fresh cycle of high employee engagement. This follows the belief that the drivers of extraordinary effort are mainly situational and scalable to some looming sense of crisis. For them the key to engagement lies in crafting fresh bursts of urgency, always for the current cycle and near term.

This approach denies some more stable and powerful organizational influences on emotional engagement such as the culture, executive leadership, and key characteristics of managers. It also severely misjudges the general level of intelligence—if not cynicism—of employees and managers when they’re subjected to such manipulation while being kept in the dark about the company's true condition, status and state-of-mission.

“Tell Me My Part in the Mission!”

Conversely, mundane day-to-day Items such as communicating the importance of projects to organizational success, or the connection between one’s work and the company’s strategy—have been found to have very high levels of influence on discretionary effort, according to one well-designed piece of research. Along with a reputation for honesty and integrity, those and other communication venues ranked high as influential cultural characteristics, in a 2004 employee engagement survey undertaken by the Corporate Leadership Council. This study looked at some 300 different “engagement levers” with 50,000 employees in 59 companies and 10 different industry groups.