Organizations tend to assume that high employee engagement is always positive and low engagement is always negative. But in truth, an employee engagement strategy that is based on data and communicated with clarity is much better than one that mandates high engagement at any cost.
Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with Bradley Brummel, PhD, professor and director of the industrial-organizational psychology program at the University of Houston, about using employee engagement as a strategy—or, in some cases, doing the opposite successfully.
“Modeling the way that you want employees to work in an organization makes the exchange clearer,” Brad said.
Read on to learn about the pros and cons of employee engagement and why transparency is so essential to creating an effective engagement strategy.
Engagement and Work-Life Balance
Brad’s longstanding interest in employee engagement is related to segmentation versus integration strategies. Segmentation means keeping work and life separate, and integration means mixing them together. People’s preferences for segmentation or integration are highly varied, affected by many factors in their personal and professional lives.
Organizations have different policies and practices about work and nonwork; however, sometimes their practices differ from their policies. Examples include nonmandatory meetings that truly are mandatory and expected availability outside of work hours on weeknights, weekends, and vacations. “If you say that you support one thing and do another thing, you leave your employees trying to read the tea leaves on how things actually work,” Brad said.
In a recent paper coauthored with Haley Cobb, PhD, assistant professor at Louisiana State University, Brad explored organizational boundary management strategies. “Often, the effects of the strategy get watered down because it’s not implemented throughout the employee life cycle beyond recruiting,” he observed. Consistency across employee engagement policies and practices, whether they support a high or low engagement strategy, is key.
Pros and Cons of High Employee Engagement
Different levels of engagement can apply to different parts of the workplace. An employee can be engaged with a role, other employees, policies, culture, and reputation. “When you’re trying to improve engagement, it ends up being about which areas of the workplace you could improve,” Brad said. “It’s not just ‘more’ or ‘less’ engagement. At the strategic level, it really requires you to look at where your company may be struggling.” Such areas of improvement might include learning and skills development, benefit packages, or workplace relationships.
Advantages of High Employee Engagement
High employee engagement tends to convey competitive advantage in the forms of increased productivity and job satisfaction, innovative solutions, positive citizenship behaviors, reduced absenteeism, and improved retention. Engaged employees often exceed what’s required by the role by bringing more of themselves to the workplace. Industrial-organizational psychologists call this concept discretionary effort.
From a personality perspective, someone who tends to demonstrate absorption, vigor, and discretionary effort at work likely has high typical intellectual engagement and high positive affect, Brad explained. People with these characteristics are usually engaged in their lives in general and bring that tendency to work too.
Disadvantages of High Employee Engagement
However, a highly engaged workforce isn’t always beneficial. High employee engagement can sometimes yield disadvantages.
- Burnout – Giving highly engaged employees increasing amounts of work can turn their discretionary efforts into obligation. If their work-life balance isn’t protected, they are likely to burn out.
- Takeover – Employees who care or identify closely with their work may deviate from organizational strategy. Their innovation and excitement could cause them to try to implement their own vision.
- Turnover – Engaged employees are more likely to pursue professional development. Their excellent performance might come to the notice of recruiters or competitors.
- Personal lives – People who bring their whole selves to work might allow their home lives to take up space at work, just as their work lives may do at home. This can include familial obligations, personality-driven behavioral styles, and political opinions, all of which may cause workplace friction.
Just as a high engagement strategy can have drawbacks, a low engagement strategy can have benefits.
Pros and Cons of Low Employee Engagement
Some organizations have cultures and policies that pay little or no attention to employee engagement. In organizations with piece-rate contract work, a gig economy, or a distributed workforce, it would seem forced or artificial to promote certain types of engagement. Where organizations with low employee engagement fail is trying to increase engagement in the wrong category. “Are you going to have a best friend at work if you drive Uber? Probably not,” Brad said.
Sometimes, however, it’s appropriate for workers to remain highly task focused and spend no discretionary effort at work. For many employees, it really is just about the contract—and that can be fine. “The real question here is does the job actually require or afford the possibility for people to be engaged across certain categories? Do they even want to be engaged?” Brad asked. He pointed out that organizations in these situations can allow people to make a distinction between work and life and spend their extra energy on their hobbies and interests.
Clarity in Work-Life Boundaries
Work-nonwork boundaries that are inconsistent or poorly defined can cause employee disengagement. “Transparency about the actual relationship is important,” Brad stated. This relationship might necessarily be different across classes of workers. Manual work, hourly wages, and frontline roles all tend to convey the expectation of segmented work. Knowledge work, salaries, and executive roles usually imply integration.
Employee engagement strategy at its worst can feel like a trick to get workers to work harder for the same amount of or less money. Brad suggested that organizations and employees evaluate whether the relationship is a fair exchange. For-profit corporations typically aim to provide the most value for shareholders, not employees. The competitive advantages they use to attract and retain workers should be equal to the time, effort, knowledge, expertise, and commitment they expect.
Building an Effective Engagement Strategy
Here’s an engagement strategy that is not effective: Saying engagement is a priority while expending no effort to build engagement. That’s just manipulative and unethical.
An effective engagement strategy is a transparent strategy. This includes transparency not only about discretionary effort, but also about less overt concepts such as job duration and benefits. An organization that typically hires early-career professionals for two to three years should not claim role longevity as a competitive advantage. Similarly, an organization with robust benefits but lower pay ought to be direct about setting employee expectations regarding compensation.
Engagement Strategy Data
Employee engagement strategy must originate from data. “The simple answer from an organizational psychology perspective is actually doing job analysis,” Brad said. This helps organizations understand what’s needed in the job, as well as employee life cycle modeling and segmentation strategies. Engagement is a high investment strategy that isn’t universally necessary for every role. “There’s a way to say, ‘We’re going to invest less of these psychological resources and development in you, but we’re also not expecting you to invest in us in the same way,’” he pointed out.
Effective engagement data also come from employee surveys. Organizations that evaluate how their employees feel about the working environment should be prepared to respond to the results. Circling back to the importance of transparency, leaders must be willing to give one of three answers to survey data: yes, we’ll change; no, that’s not in our strategy; or not yet, but we’ll put it in the queue. Having the infrastructure to invest in change is a prerequisite to employee listening.
“I applaud companies that are willing to say the things that they don’t do and why,” Brad said. “You’re giving people clarity if you can say, ‘Hey, you might get paid less, but you’ll get these benefits,’ or ‘Your supervisor actually will care about you.’ That’s that piece where most companies don’t have a strategy around engagement—or at least not one that’s enacted fully.”
