Employee Engagement and Creativity

Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006 by Frank Roche

Tom Peters has an interesting and important post titled Impact on Organizational Productivity. It’s a summary of a Gallup survey called Who’s Driving Innovation at Your Company? Val Willis from TPG writes:

When Gallup asked people to agree or not with this statement: ” My current job brings out my most creative ideas,” the responses based on levels of engagement are as follows:

Engaged Employees = 59% agree

Not Engaged Employees = 17% agree

Actively Disengaged Employees = 3% agree

Fantastic stuff. We often hear about how engagement gets results, but those results must be a matter of executing on creative ideas. The Gallup survey says:

Gallup research has shown that engaged employees are more productive, profitable, safer, create stronger customer relationships, and stay longer with their company than less engaged employees.

In HR, we often have performance reviews that assess technical and interpersonal skills, but this study makes me wonder if there would be something to issuing an “Engagement Rating.” This gets at the quit-and-stay issue pretty clearly. How can a person be a key contributor and still be disengaged from the company? Maybe it’s really up to HR break that link…when people quit, they don’t get to stay.

User Comments

Martijn

Sep 19th, 2006

Isn’t it HR’s failure when people quit-and-stay? Isn’t it HR’s job to engage people and utilize their skills to the maximum extent? If HR fails to do so, isn’t it taking the easy way out by ridding the company from those who’ve lost interest instead of breaking the link the other way around: by motivating the workforce in the many ways HR can?
Martijn

Sep 19th, 2006

I had left a comment for this post, but it doesn’t seem to show.

My key point is that breaking the link by ridding the company of those who aren’t engaged is actually a wrong way of cleaning up the mess HR (and linemanagers who practice HR) have created themselves. HR – in it’s employee champion role – should be able to engage the workforce by utilizing it to its full potential. If not, HR has failed, not the not-engaged.
Frank

Sep 19th, 2006

Hi Martin, sorry, but we have comment moderation on. Now that you’ve left comments your future comments should show right away.

I’m with you on the motivation. In fact, we used to ask the question, “That employee was the best person you could hire at the time, right? So, what did you do to him?” My point is that quit-and-stays, on some level are unrecoverable. And they can drag down a company or group. This is a bit of a “Beware of the Study of Turtles.” Focusing too much energy on the “nont-engaged” can be counter-productive at some level. But not letting people get that way…now that’t sto your point. And it’s HR’s job to provide the tools to help everyone be engaged and motivated.