For over 20 years, employee engagement has been touted as a key way to measure employees. Yet, despite millions spent and countless hours, employee engagement has not improved, overall in over 20 years.
In fact, as reported by Gallup, Qualtrics, and Culture Amp, overall employee engagement has actually gone down over time. It's become clear that traditional engagement metrics and surveys fall short of capturing what employees really want: to feel happy, valued, and connected in their work.
William Kahn first wrote about engagement in 1990. In 2021, William Kahn was interviewed about his thoughts on modern employee engagement surveys and platforms. When asked what he thought of what companies have done with engagement, this is what he had to say…
“Employee engagement is fundamentally and violently different” than what I was talking about in 1990. Bill went on to explain that it is hard to measure how people are really feeling with engagement surveys. He said that to accurately measure what he originally wrote about in 1990, “someone is going to have to develop a measure and a way to really bring the focus on the employee [how they feel] and on the relationship between the employee and their leaders.”
Many experts have talked about the shortcomings of engagement surveys over the years.
What is the difference between employee happiness, satisfaction, and engagement?
Great question, you are not alone in asking. In short, happiness and satisfaction have well established and easy to understand meanings.
The word Happiness was created in the 1100s. Happiness simply means to “feel glad.” People know if they feel glad. Happiness can be measured by the presence of positive feelings, the absence of negative feelings, and having what you need or want.
The word Satisfaction was created in the 1500s. Satisfaction simply means to “have enough.” People know if they feel like they have enough. Satisfaction can be measured by asking people if they have what they need or want.
The idea of employee engagement was created in 1990. There is a lot of confusion over employee engagement. In fact, according to a study conducted by Gartner, over 6 out of 10 employees have no idea what engagement means.
Employee engagement was an idea that was first written about in 1990 by William Kahn. At the time, employee satisfaction surveys were not producing results. In short, there wasn’t a meaningful improvement in employee satisfaction scores and companies were looking for something new.
In 2000, several companies started to create surveys to measure employee engagement. Their first step was to create their own, made up definitions of employee engagement. It is worth noting that there is no single, agreed on definition of employee engagement.
Here are the currently used definitions of employee engagement by leading companies that measure it:
- Gallup’s definition of engagement is “employee engagement is the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their workplace.”
- Qualtrics’ engagement definition - “employee engagement is how much an employee is committed to helping their organization achieve its goals.”
- Glint’s definition of engagement is that “employee engagement is the degree to which employees invest their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral energies toward positive individual and business outcomes.”
- Culture Amp’s definition of engagement is that “employee engagement represents the levels of enthusiasm and connection employees have with their organization.”
- Quantum Workplace’s engagement definition - “employee engagement is the strength of the mental and emotional connection employees feel toward their organization.
In an article titled “What do we Really Know about Employee Engagement,” researchers and scholars Alan Saks and Jamie Gruman describe that employee engagement has been and continues to be plagued by three issues:
- First, numerous definitions of employee engagement exist, and there continues to be a lack of agreement and consensus on what engagement actually means.
- Second, numerous surveys have been developed (each with their own unique questions) to measure employee engagement, and there continue to be questions about how to measure engagement as well as the validity of existing measures.
- Third, employee well-being and happiness were ignored as a method to measure employee engagement.
Amazing Workplace has a registered trademark on Employee Happiness(R) because they are the first and only company to accurately measure Employee Happiness.
Learn more at www.amazingworkplace.com
The engagement problem and happiness solution. Headline news.
Consider the following, for 20 years, researchers and scholars have been discussing the shortcomings of employee engagement and the need to focus on what matters most to employees, their happiness. Here’s a quick recap of the headlines on this topic.
The Engagement Problem Headlines:
- Focus on Human Needs Because Employee Engagement has Failed. 2023
- Why Caring About Your Employees Matters More than Engagement. 2019
- Employee Engagement. Forget it. 2015
- Employee Engagement? What if Employees Don’t Want to be Engaged? 2015
- It's Time to Rethink the Employee Engagement Issue. 2014
- Employee Engagement: Nobody Cares. 2011
Sources: Forbes, Management Issues, Huffington Post, Deloitte, Harvard University.
The Happiness Solution Headlines:
- Why Happy Employees are Good for Business. 2024
- Happy Workers are 13% More Productive. 2023
- Creating a Happier Workplace is Possible and Worth It. 2023
- Employee Happiness (not engagement) is a Leading Indicator of Profitability and Productivity. 2022
- Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness. 2022
- Promoting Employee Happiness Benefits Everyone. 2017
Sources: Business.com, University of Oxford, Harvard University, MIT, Forbes
Amazing Workplace has a registered trademark on Employee Happiness® because they are the first and only company to accurately measure Employee Happiness.
Learn more at www.amazingworkplace.com
Are Likert (pronounced LICK-ert) Scale surveys giving an accurate picture of how employees feel?
Short answer, less than 70% of the time. You may not know the name, but if you’ve ever taken a survey, you are surely familiar with the Likert Scale. Here is an example:
Please let us know how you feel about the following statements:
“I have a best friend at work.”
a. Strongly agree
b. Agree
c. Neither agree nor disagree
d. Disagree
e. Strongly disagree
The five ‘answers’ listed above were developed in the 1940s by Rensis Lickert. He was asked by the US Government to measure how citizens and soldiers reacted to the bombing done by the US in Germany and Japan.
Rensis Likert warned of the shortcomings of the scale he developed. Most people are unaware that Rensis Likert’s early research depended heavily on live conversations to gather information on how people felt using his scale. He understood the need to interact with people (have a conversation) in order to get their actual feelings or attitudes on various issues.
All of his early research was built around human conversations. In discussing the challenges of non-conversation-based feedback, Likert wrote the following:
“It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the reactions on an attitude test (using the Likert scale in a survey) are no more meaningful than the situation in which the attitude test was given.”
Extensive research has been done looking into the Lickert Scale and its reliability percentages. The Likert Scale has been found to deliver a reliability of around 69%. Non-Likert scales (that remove the ‘middle’ answer of neither agree nor disagree) have been found to deliver a reliability of around 93%. The reliability gap is tied to two fundamental flaws in traditional survey ‘tests’:
- The answer options do not always give survey takers the opportunity to share how they really feel.
- There is no verification (at no point does a survey present to a participant how it appears they feel and give them the opportunity to confirm or change that feeling).
Enter Amazing Workplace’s patent-pending feeling verification technology. Amazing Workplace developed the first-ever Conversation System that gives participants the opportunity to share how they really feel. Furthermore, Amazing Workplace uses a verification technology that presents participants with how it appears they feel and then also the opportunity to confirm or change that feeling. The result = Amazing Workplace delivers 100% reliability because it verifies people’s feelings before they end a survey conversation.