The Fallacy of measuring Employee Engagement

I have been updating the Newly added Favorite Blog Posts & Articles section in the What’s New On This Site column in the sidebar for a while now, but this is the first time that I feel the urge to write about one of them. The blog post in question is Engagement Soup by Bret L. Simmons in his own Blog by the same name. There are several reasons why this post quickly becomes one of my favorites: its author (Bret is a well known and respected blogger on Leadership), its timely and timeless subject (Engagement), as well as its demonstration of critical thinking. By all means, go there and read the entire article and the great follow-up dialogue between Bret and the readers. But before you do that, here is my two cents:

The Engagement Soup post is a reaction to an article by Michelle Conlin in the August 24 & 31, 2009 special issue of BusinessWeek entitled Is Optimism a Competitive Advantage. In the article, Collin stated that, according to most human resources managers:

"optimistic, engaged employees are more productive and hence can help their employers grow and make more money. Put simply, workplace optimism, if nurtured properly, can be a competitive advantage."

No argument there from Bret (or myself). But then Collin went on to say:

"Companies don’t directly measure the optimism of their employees. Instead they rely on engagement scores, typically gathered by outside consultants who exhaustively survey the staff."

It’s an interesting statement and a fact (yes, there are scores of evidence to prove the truthfulness of the statement) that many, many large/successful/respected/… companies use external consultants with proprietary methods of measuring the levels of employee engagement and correlate them to the business growth and profit. Brett pointed out that most if not all the statements used in the employee survey (from one of the leading consultancy firms in this field) have NOTHING to do with employee engagement, neither as direct Cause nor Effect indicators.

Here is a typical statement:

"I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right."

And here is Bret’s observation: 

"Should we believe that BECAUSE you are engaged, you are given the materials and equipment you need to do the work right? Or is it that because you are given the materials and equipment to do the work right you are engaged?" 

I love his analogy of measuring the health of a tree:

"Want to know if a tree is healthy? Look at the leaves and the fruit. These are indicators of the health of the tree. Just because we give our tree lots of fertilizer, water, and sunlight does NOT mean it is healthy."

Unlike many who should no better, Bret has seen through the fog of correlative analysis with his critical thinking. Without saying it out loud, Bret has succeeded in pointing out (at least to me) that this practice of substituting a correlation for a causal effect is at best questionable and at worse, a pile of horse s..t … er, fertilizer.

This Engagement Soup post is definitely a keeper in my Favorite Blog Posts & Articles. 

 

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