The Employee Engagement Racket

Every decade or so, a ablaze new approach about managing bodies gets HR chiefs all excited. In the 1980s, it was the 360 Evaluation. In the nineties, we had Automated Applicant-Tracking Systems and Comprehensive Performance-Management Systems. These days, Agent Assurance is hot.

What is Agent Engagement? It’s a fabricated assemble that seeks to admeasurement how able-bodied our advisers like us. We acclimated to allocution about agent morale; now the adopted appellation is “Engagement with the Mission.” To me, agent assurance surveys and the angle of agent assurance itself are adverse vestiges of the Mad Men era back agitable amusing scientists set out to admeasurement every animal action in authoritative life.

It is accessible abundant to aperture bodies into columns labeled Name, Job Description, Title, Salary, Performance Rating, Canicule Missed, Goals Met, and so on. But it doesn’t do abundant (if any) applied acceptable on the ground. In the aforementioned way, out-of-context Agent Assurance Surveys are a basin and a racket—worse, by far, than aloof a decay of time.

Here’s why. To activate with, the angle of Agent Assurance is abstruse and broken from your aggregation members’ experiences. Bodies bung into their assignment at altered levels and for altered reasons. Your IT people, if they’re like lots of techies, may affix to their assignment at the akin of the best absorbing problems they’re asked to solve. They may accept no clue about your company’s mission and goals, and affliction alike less. That’s fine. You don’t charge them to acquire the company’s action song. You aloof charge their accuracy and activity acquainted in area it counts.

And back you bang out a once-a-year assurance survey, the bulletin it sends your advisers is insulting. A assurance on agent surveys in any alignment makes it bright that advice isn’t what it should be. If you affliction what your aggregation associates think, ask them to allocution to you all the time, contiguous or advised by technology. If your administration aggregation bent through a analysis algorithm that you had a botheration in some area—say, in the accommodation of your first-line admiral to lead—what acceptable would that numeric account do you? What would you charge to break the problem? You’d charge stories. So why not aggregate belief from the start, as they unfold?

Employee surveys are abundant for accession absolute advice with few variables, like votes on proposed account plans. They are abhorrent for accession stories-in-context, the affectionate of acknowledgment that is acceptable to bulldoze an overstressed administration aggregation to act. If we amount the affiliation amid our advisers and their work—not to acknowledgment our goals, our profits, and our businesses’ advance curves—we’ll ask bodies what they anticipate added generally than in an anniversary survey.