Emotion and Employee Engagement

“The state of many organisations today is like that of a body-builder who exercises only one arm.” Michael Lee Stallard in “Fired up or Burned Out” published by Thomas Nelson 2007. 

This metaphor sums up the operating effectiveness of most organisations brilliantly. It is totally unrealistic for any management team to think to compete effectively when three quarters or less of their employees are engaged in their work.

It is a no-brainer that companies with higher employee engagement generate higher shareholder returns, and study figures quoted by Stallard indicate that committed employees outperform the average employee by 20% and are 87% less likely to leave.

Simply extrapolating from those numbers suggests that a company  with total employee engagement would outperform one with only 25% employee engagement, by a factor of 100 x 20% vs. 25 x 20% or 4:1 – and that would be before any of the costs of replacement are factored in which would be just over 10% of the latter! That certainly justifies the analogy. But perhaps the challenge isn't as daunting as it first seems!

Stallard quotes a 2004 research study undertaken by the Corporate Leadership Council of 50,000 employees at 59 global companies that found, “emotional factors were 4 times more effective in increasing employee engagement than rational factors.”  This has profound implications for managers who, if they are responsible for employee engagement, are then also clearly responsible for the emotional well-being of their people.

But emotions are intensely personal and no-one - even managers – can reasonably take responsibility for another’s emotions: at the very most they can only endeavour to facilitate an atmosphere that fosters another’s positive emotional state. 

Consequently any manager endeavouring to remedy the employee engagement problem is attempting the impossible; it is inappropriate to try and unreasonable for anyone to expect it of them. It is therefore little wonder that such efforts appear futile and the disengagement numbers keep increasing despite best efforts to turn things around.

Certainly managers have a part to play in improving employee engagement, but only to the extent they can be held accountable for developing an environment that stimulates appropriate emotional responses by their people. Perhaps it is efforts to do more that are undermining their own emotional well-being and compounding the problem. It just needs a lighter hand with recognition of the need to be leaders rather than managers. Rather than exercising the other arm more, managers would do better to exercise the powerful arm less!