Employee Engagement In The World Of Work

Employee Engagement

organisations have for many years been interested in understanding employee engagement in the world of work.

Over the years organisations have focused on morale, job satisfaction, employee satisfaction and employee sentiment. They current focus is Employee Engagement, but the underlying purpose remains the same.

organisations mainly use employee surveys to try and understand how their employees feel about the work experience. Unsurprisingly, “employee experience” is a big driver of employee engagement.

The reason that employee engagement in the world of work is considered to be so important is that there is a belief that the more positively employees feel about their work and their organisations, the more productive they will be and the more they will contribute.

As a result, organisations are always seeking to measure and then improve their employee engagement. They do this primarily with a view to improving their organisational performance. The route to improvement is usually through a series of organisational development programs. Unfortunately, some organisations simply pretend to be better and more engaging workplaces than they really are. They usually do this through a process of organisational culture washing.

Societal Employee Engagement

It’s not only organisations who seek to measure employee engagement in the world of work. Polling bodies and government organisations also seek to understand employee engagement as national and sector levels as well. Some of the findings of these organisations have made interesting reading over the past decade. Many of them have been used to explain specific narratives about our relationships with work and the future of work.

In their 2024 report (based on 2023 research), Gallup say that 15% of the global workforce is actively disengage and describes this cohort as workers who actively oppose their organisations goals. In total they find that only 18% of non-managers are engaged and only 30% of managers are engaged. They go on to estimate that low employee engagement costs the global economy US$8.9 trillion, or 9% of global GDP.

Anyway, you get the point. Many people are working at a national level to assess employee engagement and to link it to lost income (or output) through the assumption that it correlates with productivity. As a result of all this narrative and calculation, the world is full of people looking to help improve engagement and thus productivity.

We think that understanding the relationships that employees have with their organisations and their work is a very good thing to do, despite the sort of tongue-in-cheek nature of this post. We also genuinely believe that the more engaged employees are, the more productive they will be. And furthermore, we fully believe that engaged employees don’t just benefit their employers, they also have better qualities of life and benefit wider society.

However, despite these beliefs we are slightly tongue-in-cheek about this subject. And the reason is that we think that intention matters. When organisations set out to improve employee engagement so that they can profit from it, it yields different results to when they set out to improve employee experience for the sake of improving the quality of existence for their employees.

Perhaps, fundamentally, we think that there is a fair bit of hypocrisy in this space. Most people, and most large organisations, know how to create engaging working environments and cultures for their teams. The challenge though is doing so in a cost-efficient way that provides strong returns to shareholders. And, often, it is the shareholders (or whoever controls capital) who win these battles, not the employees. As ever, a lot of work in the organisational psychology and engagement space boils down to efforts to get employees to work harder for less reward. And this is perhaps a bit jading.

In no way are we trying to say that employee engagement isn’t a good thing to improve. We’re simply saying that if organisations genuinely want to improve engagement, they can do so. However, to do so they need to be genuine in their intentions to do so, and to stop giving with one hand and taking away with the other.