A beautiful piece was posted on Wharton’s website a few years ago that said the modern job market is where employee loyalty has reached an all-time low. The story listed the main reasons for this as losses of hope after the 2008 financial crisis, less money spent on training and benefits for workers, and how millennials saw their employers’ behavior.
No matter what the reason is, today’s workers are not nearly as loyal as older generations were. It’s debatable whether this is a good or bad thing, but managers are in a tough spot.
What employers need to know about employee loyalty
Modern businesses need loyal employees for many reasons, but the most important is that losing a lot of employees costs the company money. The costs of changing an employee who has worked for the company for a few years are high, especially when you consider that the new employee will be less productive at first.
There are a lot of things that companies do to keep their best employees. The end goal is generally to get employees to the point where they are not only happy working for the company but also give it their all every day. A lot of the time going above 100%.
To get a better picture of employee motivation, though, we need to bust a myth that a lot of people believe about employee engagement, happiness, and motivation.
The Myth That “Happiness Equals Engagement”
A lot of the time, when you ask managers and HR staff about employee engagement, they will say that happy employees and engaged employees are the same thing. It makes sense at first. People who are happy with their job will go above and beyond because they are thankful to work for such a company.
Another way to look at it is that employee happiness does not always mean employee involvement. Many experts will agree with this.
An employee might be pleased with their job if they get a good wage, good perks, and a ping-pong table. They are happy. They are always thankful for the good things in their lives because they know how bad their friends’ jobs and companies are.
Because of this, it doesn’t mean they will go above and beyond what is expected of them. There is no promise that they will think about how they can help their company all the time, but it is likely that they won’t slack off too much either.
We can now agree on what employee engagement means, which is a useful shortcut (we’ll talk more about how flexible it is later). Gallup says that engaged workers are “psychologically committed to their jobs and likely to be making positive contributions to their organizations.” Most people will agree with this description.
It doesn’t say anywhere that all engaged employees are happy or that all happy employees are engaged.
That brings us to another reason why engaged and happy employees are not the same thing. In other words, it’s not unusual to see a very involved worker who isn’t thrilled about their job or where the company is at the moment. Being involved means that this worker wants to make their job and company better so that they are happy. They do this by working hard to reach their goal.
What You Need to Know About Engaging Employees Today
One of the first things you should know about modern employee engagement (or any kind of engagement, for that matter) is that it’s not something that can be measured in a useful and objective way.
It comes down to surveys for most companies, which are still likely the smartest and most useful way to get feedback. But it’s important to note that a lot of companies do these surveys without thinking about it, and either get mediocre results or, even worse, don’t do anything with them.
When you poll your workers, they really believe that you will address their concerns, which is a good sign. If you do surveys on employee engagement and happiness just to say you did them, they will probably have the opposite effect of what you wanted. That being said, there are also experts like Robert Gerst who think these polls are completely pointless.
With their anonymous reviews of workplaces and employers, websites like Glasdoor are hard to avoid these days. It is important to note, though, that only about 2% of workers actually write reviews, and when they do, they are much more likely to be negative. So, you shouldn’t pay too much attention to the bad reviews, even the ones that say employees aren’t working hard enough.
You should also know that it’s not a good idea to try to copy another company’s ways of getting employees to work hard. Every company is unique and has its own quirks. This means that something that works for one company might feel forced and fake in yours, which can hurt employee engagement (the “forced fun” problem).
The last thing you should know is that some people will never be interested. They’ll do their jobs, and you’ll start to depend on them for some things. Not every employee you have has to be really into their job all the time. Everything is fine here. Not everyone works hard at their job.
Word to End
Not all employees are engaged, even if they are happy. Getting your employees to work hard is also not something you can force or copy from someone else.
Do not try to get your workers to be more engaged because you want them to be more productive. Instead, do it because you want them to enjoy coming to work. Talk to people when you sit down. Pay attention to them. Listen to them. Pay attention to what they have to say.
Everything else will just happen on its own.
