A Case Against Employee Engagement

I think the Founding Fathers were on to something. For those of us who missed that day in tenth-grade social studies, here’s what they said:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

There are lots of ways to of explaining how to go about measuring and impacting how people perform on the job. I’m not going to get in to another history lesson here, but around the time of the Spice Girls some smart guys from Harvard published The Service Profit Chain with actual research on the connection between employee satisfaction and the bottom line. We won’t talk about how some of that research was criticized. Despite those meddling confounding variables, it was still a groundbreaking idea.

Enter the popularization of Employee Engagement and the notion that focusing on people’s Strengths is the key to unlocking potential. You mean if we treat people like people instead of like machines they will give more at work? So the pursuit of Discretionary Effort was on, and we partied like it was 1999 (because it was).

But what came next even Stephen Hawking couldn’t have predicted. It was clear that we needed to go Beyond Engagement because it’s not just about people’s hearts and minds, it’s about putting people into an environment where they can not only feel good about what they are doing but be more productive, and thereby make us more money, er, I mean align their behavior with our business objectives.

Great stuff, especially if you’re a management consultant trying to break through all the noise around the engagement fad. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that a solution that goes “beyond engagement” is better than engagement. And as a bonus it also served to advance the management consultant’s point of view: This mysterious thing called Engagement is too complex for mere mortals to navigate alone.

Now, a new decade brings new ideas — but I wonder if they are just old ideas that worked? I’ve heard a lot of credible people talking about Happiness (again). Yep, It’s 2012 not 1776. But here’s my challenge: Let’s put aside the semantics and prejudice about the words (go find happiness on your own time, right?) and look at what’s going on here.

When you compare some of the latest thinking about how to increase employee engagement by creating the right rewards and you compare that to the Science of Happiness, we get this crosswalk of the keys to both Engagement and Happiness:

For those checking the references, there is an additional element of Happiness that talks about the importance of “Connectedness,” which is also well established in the Engagement research. We’ve all heard this one: People quit their bosses, not their companies, right?

Anyway, in the article they’re talking about creating the right types of intangible rewards for people. Of course people have to pay the rent, but we’ve pretty much figured out that money is mostly a maintenance factor. That just means people will leave if you don’t pay them enough (baby needs new shoes), but paying them more won’t make them passionate about their work.

Now back to the Founding Fathers for a second to bring this baby home. Of course they were creating a kickass country and they figured it would be best for the government to get out of the way of its people pursuing Happiness. Better yet, they even believed that setting government policy based on that core tenet should be written down and signed by everybody.

What if organizational leaders did the same thing?

Granted it might just be my aversion to expensive rings, but I’d rather be Happy than Engaged. I really think those dudes were on to something.

By Kerry Leidich

Kerry is a senior vice president at Humantelligence and leads the development of the company's product and partnership strategies. Prior to joining Humantelligence he served in several senior roles at Hay Group, a global management consulting firm. Kerry holds an M.S. in I/O psychology from San Francisco State University.