Zombies at Work

Could it be that employee engagement is the magic bullet that is the key to successful business? All indications point to a resounding 'yes' ... Ask yourself the question: do you wake up each morning and look forward to going to work? Do you enjoy the work you do and get a buzz from the people you work with? Do you feel appreciated? If the answer is "yes" it's likely you are engaged with work.

If the answer is "I go to work because I have to", or worse still, an outright "no", then you are likely to fall into the 15% of Australian employees actively disengaged or the 64% of Australian employees who are not engaged with their work

The problem of employee disengagement is far-reaching and potentially devastating. It has an impact on absenteeism, productivity, staff turnover, client or customer satisfaction, and ultimately, bottom line results. Research from The Gallup Organisation indicates that, rather like one rotten apple spoiling the batch, or an insidious cancer spreading from one cell to another, it takes four people in the engaged group to neutralise the activities of the actively disengaged - a ratio of 4:1. In Australia the situation is even more dire - the ratio is 2:1 disengaged.

Discretionary effort
Melissa Dunn Lampe, principal consultant, global leadership at The Gallup Organisation, defines engagement as a willingness on the employee's part to give discretionary effort to the organisation they work for - to go above and beyond the call of duty and have a passion for what they do.

Engagement, put simply, is the emotional and intellectual connection an individual employee has with both their job and their organisation. 

"When we look to define the difference between engaged employees and those who are not engaged or are actively disengaged, we look at people who are really connected psychologically with their workplace," Dunn Lampe confirms.

That connection covers off elements such as how the employee relates to the organisation and the people they work with, their sense of belonging, the fact that they have clarity around their job and recognition that goes with doing a good job, and the opportunity to develop as an individual.

One trap that organisations fall into is confusing engagement with satisfaction. Dunn Lampe notes that an employee can be quite satisfied but not very productive or engaged with their workplace. "They're not giving any discretionary effort and they're not passionate but they are quite satisfied - they turn up, they get a paycheck but all their discretionary creativity and passion will be going to outside work pursuits.

Measuring satisfaction perhaps via a culture survey doesn't go nearly far enough," she says. A simple analogy illustrates the difference between satisfaction and engagement: a person may sit on a verandah and drink a beer and may well be satisfied, but if someone or something comes down the street it's very easy for them to get up and walk away. An engaged person, however, would be out on the verandah dragging people in and saying 'come and see how great this is!'.

Misconceptions
Despite being referred to as terrorists (because of the potentially devastating impact they can have on business), disengaged employees are not bad people, and they can be revitalised. "They are very unhappy and they do try to recruit other workers to try and be unhappy with them," confirms Kim Cleworth, lead partner at Gallup. "However, they are convertible, and you can turn them around. In fact, you could argue that those sitting at the very bottom are still very passionate - they still care about something."

The actively disengaged come in all shapes and sizes, from those people nursing old wounds about an employer to someone who's expectations are not being met. Dunn Lampe cites an example of one employee in a manufacturing company who had a run of bad things happen to him at the company 22 years ago but was still emotionally tied to the company. "He could not let that go, and he could not accept that the current management group, although they'd tried very hard to right the wrongs of the past, could not go back and undo what had been done to him. He was not a bad guy, but he had made himself unfavourable because he couldn't say 'that was then, this is now'," she says.

Peter Fulcher-Meredith, communication director at brand management consultancy, ABT, says that the corporate brand and alignment of corporate and personal values should be at the heart of employee engagement. "A good sign of employee engagement is when the employee actually lives the values of the brand or company," he says. "A disconnect can occur when you get people who don't know what the company they work for stands for, or what it does. It's not always their fault. When we do focus groups we want the disengaged people, the so-called difficult ones, because through them we often find the real stories. Sometimes we manage to turn them around just by listening to them when no one else has."

The in-betweeners
Perhaps a greater challenge are those employees who come to work and simply go through the motions - they have no passion for their job or the organisation and certainly will not give more than is absolutely necessary. These employees have been referred to as zombies, or Retired On Active Duty (ROAD) warriors, and the phenomenon is known as presenteeism. "It can be harder to convert someone sitting on the fence. Once someone emotionally disconnects but stays with you it's really hard to get them back. If they're really mad at you they're at least still a little bit emotionally connected to you and you may be able to salvage that by figuring out what the actual problem is and helping them figure out ways to overcome that - not fixing it for them but helping them find a way through it," says Dunn Lampe.

Michelle Ciecura, national HR consulting manager at LINK HR Consulting, notes that a primary objective of managers is to identify staff with a presenteeism mindset. "Identify staff in this mindset, and come up with tailored action plans to address their situation. Staff sitting on the fence are in a good position to be reengaged - they see both the good and bad in an organisation, and are still open to being persuaded either way," she says.

Managers need to be perceptive and differentiate staff that are satisfied with working nine to five (and who have actively chosen this approach to managing their career) from staff who are disengaged because they are unchallenged in their role. Ultimately, not everyone is driven to progress or work in a challenging role - an organisation full of A-type personalities achieving at 100% will not work.

Ciecura adds that presenteeism should not always be viewed as a negative - managers should acknowledge it does exist. Differentiating staff who have a presenteeism mindset because they are not in the right role is the key. "If you have a talented employee in the wrong role, take steps to challenge them, even if you can't move them into a more suitable position - let them know there is a future for them at the organisation. Give them new projects or management responsibilities and develop a progression plan that will move them into a more suitable area," she adds.

The disconnect
It's also possible for an employee to be engaged with their job - to love what they do for a living - but be disengaged with the organisation they work for. An example would be the healthcare sector where a nurse may love what they do and get a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction from that role, but they may hate the hospital they work for, the bureaucracy and the politics. "When there is that disconnect, in terms of messaging we need to look at what the organisation does to add value to the profession. That's about the values that the organisation has and how that's going to impact on the employee's role. For example, if they are a healthcare professional, how can the organisation deliver better patient outcomes?" says Kelly Samson, regional practice leader, Right Management.

The disconnect can also work the other way: high connection to the company; limited connection to the role. In these cases it's important to consider why this is the case. Why does the person not get any enjoyment out of the work they do? Is it possible they are doing the wrong job? Is it about how the work is structured or extra skills that are required? "Those people are almost there, and it's about finding out how they can release that discretionary effort where they are making a true contribution," Samson adds.

Measuring engagement
Taking the engagement pulse of an organisation is not as easy as it sounds, but there is no way to quantify feelings without going through some sort of qualitative data gathering process. That is most commonly achieved through surveys.

The Gallup Organization has a long history of polls and surveys, and they have applied their knowledge to what they call the Q12 (see box). These are 12 sometimes quite confronting questions that cover four tiers of engagement. The effectiveness of any survey depends on the language used and the questions asked. The Q12, for example, uses language specifically to polarise people to determine if they are engaged or not.

Not only do the right areas need to be probed, there also needs to be something to measure the results against - benchmark figures. "You do see some organisations doing it internally, via their HR team or someone who's just finished their psych degree at university, and that's a risk because they don't have the knowledge or the benchmarking that might sit behind that. There's a lot more sophistication out there," says Samson.

Another problem is when culture or engagement surveys are done at the organisational level. Research has shown that engagement happens at team level, so the results need to be broken down and analysed at that level. "You could be at the same organisation and have vastly different experiences at work every day depending on who your manager is and who your co-workers are," says Dunn Lampe.

Samson notes that respondent burden can also be a problem. "There are a lot of surveys going on in organisations, so it's important to keep them short, and also ensure you ask qualitative questions - that is, open-ended questions. The importance there is that employees are not confined by the questions you ask - it helps you understand some of the stories that sit behind the results. For example, you may discover that people are concerned about reward and recognition but what part of it?"

A recent survey of the Fortune 500 companies asked if those companies use some sort of culture survey and also asked how it was working. Eighty per cent of those organisations had some sort of employee survey in place and the average number of questions was 115. As Dunn Lampe explains, if an organisation has just 25 employees and each one of them responded to 115 questions, a manager could be forgiven for looking at those results and throwing up their arms in despair. "Sixty per cent of those companies said they were worse off after the survey than before they undertook it. I often say to leaders if you cannot put you hand on your heart and say 'I pledge to undertake some sort of priority action after a survey', then don't do it'," she says.

Failure to follow through or communicate the results of a survey can be devastating. "It's quite easy following the survey to go into analysis paralysis in terms of constant analysis of the data. It's almost like a need to rationalise why the results are what they are, and people can get buried in that and forget the most important thing which is to actually take action and communicate back to that group," says Samson. "You've asked your employees to communicate to you and then you fail to act or fail to communicate what you're doing. People get frustrated and those who fall into the disengaged group say 'I told you so'."

Common drivers
Prior to measuring engagement, however, it helps to have some idea of what the drivers are in the first place. Research by Right Management points to 11 different factors that drive engagement, which include: the core values of the organisation and the values around the customer (or customer advocacy - the extent to which customers would recommend the company); workload stress; open and honest communication; internal pay parity; career opportunities; empowerment; immediate manager; senior leaders and teamwork; and the extent to which people are praised. Australian companies score particularly poorly on open and honest communication, workload stress, career opportunities and senior leaders valuing employees.

Cleworth maintains that communication is the key. "If we had one bit of advice it would be for managers to spend more time listening to what their people have to say. Most managers today say they're so busy they don't have time to talk to their staff, much less listen to what people in their team have to say, but you cannot engage someone unless you connect with them as an individual," she says.

Even more fundamentally, Dunn Lampe says that manager support is crucial to engagement and suggests that employees will constantly ask themselves the following questions:
- Does someone at work care about me?
- Am I connected at work?
- Am I being valued?

"Probably the two biggest buckets these fall into would be: 'am I respected as a human being?' and 'is my contribution valued no matter what level of the organisation I'm in'?" she says.

Don't forget the brand
For Mark Orson, business director at business and brand consultancy The Right Group, the multitude of components that make up employee engagement can be summed up in the organisational brand.

The brand sums up the company's DNA. It's where it wants go and why; it's the behaviours, attitudes, processes, procedures and systems that make up that organisation. "Unless you understand all that clearly then how can you start to decide what type of people you want to recruit and retain in the first place?" Orson says. "You have the same issues in the consumer space - they are all saying the same thing. Trying to be engaged to a company that is no different to another company makes it very easy for employees to jump ship."

There can be also be a disconnect between the employee's behaviours and attitudes and what the organisation stands for. "Within reason you hire on attitude and behaviour while technical skill can be trained for. It's a key factor - the employee's personal behaviours must match with that of the company because if not it becomes like sand in an oyster - it starts to grate over time," Orson adds.

Drawing the line
Unfortunately, it's not possible to turn everyone around and there comes a point where time spent trying to convert is time wasted. "A lot of companies don't want to go there due to the talent shortage, but one of the things we've learnt is that you can't please all the people all the time. If you've done something to engage the majority of your staff and it's working and there's synchronicity, you have to understand it may not work for everyone. You will always have some it doesn't connect with. If you do your engagement correctly most people make their mind up themselves when they see the disconnect between their values and the values of the vision of the company you're working with," Fulcher-Meredith concludes.

Orson makes it even clearer: "If it comes down to the employee saying, 'I don't care, I'm not interested, I don't share the same values' - then sometimes it's not just about managing to keep them within the organisation, it's about managing them out of  the organisation."

[Source: article by Iain Hopkins, Human Resources Magazine May 2008]