Just lately I’ve been hearing this …people are tired of engagement; ‘it promised so much but delivered so little’.
Depending on which survey you look at, global engagement ranges from under 20% through to over 60%! When you view these figures against the employee engagement industry, worth billions, it doesn’t paint a great picture. But, blaming engagement is like saying eating healthy doesn’t work because we still have an obesity epidemic. Engagement isn’t the problem, it turns out ‘surrogation’ is.
I recently read a great article by Michael Harris and Bill Tayler in the Harvard Business Review (Sept/Oct 2019) about the ‘surrogation snare’ and it really resonated with my experience, and frustration, with the transactional approach to employee engagement.
In summary, surrogation is a tendency to mentally replace strategy with metrics. Let’s think about this with respect to engagement. A company decides an engaged workforce is a useful strategic objective and decides to track and measure progress via an ‘employee engagement index’. Engagement surveys are duly run and results shared with managers, who more often than not are then targeted to achieve particular scores. Managers take action, usually well meaning but often the focus is on the wrong things: they are taking action to impact the survey scores. The strategy is now about maximising survey scores (or even worse response rates) rather than developing and improving engagement with their teams. How often have you heard stories about people being coerced into filling surveys in to ensure decent response rates, bribed with a kit-kat? Have you experienced difficult conversations with managers arguing that their team results are not right because people have left/ joined or there is some big change happening, which has impacted the results unfairly? No longer is the objective about developing an engaged workforce, but about impacting the metrics.
The concept of surrogation helps us to understand why this occurs. Surrogation tends to happen when the metrics and strategy are poorly aligned, which given the issues with defining engagement, is often the case. Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick argue that there are three conditions which tend to lead to surrogation:
- The objective or strategy is fairly abstract – this is the absolutely the case with engagement. It’s well-documented that there is no single, universal definition of engagement which compounds the issue. We are still trying to figure out what it means.
- However, despite the abstract nature of engagement, the metric of the strategy is conspicuous and concrete. Again this is the case with employee engagement and the use of the employee engagement index as a metric. You can almost feel the relief here – we need to improve engagement which is a fairly abstract concept, but thankfully we have a really clear and concrete way of measuring and tracking progress.
- There is an acceptance, albeit subconsciously, of the substitution of the metric for the strategy. Again, this is something we observe in the way companies approach employee engagement. A quick look at the investment and resourcing that goes into the measurement of engagement, versus actually taking action to develop and improve it gives evidence to this.
So what can we do to tackle this issue? In the recent HBR article Michael Harris and Bill Tayler suggest the following:
- Involve those people responsible for implementing the strategy in formulating it. They argue that involvement increases understanding of what it is we are actually trying to achieve and therefore reduces the reliance on metrics. This is a tactic we advise clients to adopt – involving people in first defining what a company means by engagement, and then inviting them to help solve the problem, is a great place to start.
- Decouple to link between the metric and incentives. It’s pretty obvious that the whole time managers are incentivised to increase response rates and EEI scores, this is what they will focus on, regardless of whether their actions actually help to improve engagement.
- Use multiple metrics. EEI scores are only one way to measure engagement and in my opinion, over-reliance on EEI scores is often flawed. There are a whole host of different ways we can measure how it feels for our people working in our organisations. From outcomes such as attrition and absenteeism, through to sentiment analysis on intranet comments – even how often a team has lunch together, through to more qualitative measures.
Part of the challenge with surrogation is that it is a common subconscious bias, but addressing any one of our many subconscious biases begins with awareness.
To understand if your organisation is surrogating your employee engagement index for your strategy, you can use our free diagnostic tool to assess if your approach to engagement is more transactional or transformational.
If you discover you’re more transactional, then the chances are you are surrogating the measuring of engagement for strategy execution. To address this, start by involving managers in defining what you mean by engagement and then invite to them to help solve your engagement problem.
If you would like more information on how to move from a transactional approach to engagement to a transformational approach get in touch today
