Employee engagement is one of those topics that people can’t seem to get enough of.
There are a lot of reasons for that, but mainly, I think it is because a great many managers know that engagement is a good thing that would benefit their organizations but they simply don’t know how to get their workforce to buy in.
But in all the back-and-forth discussion about engagement, there’s one thing that seems to be perfectly clear: businesses are spending a big chunk of money trying to make it happen.
Some $720 million per year spent on engagement
Bersin & Associates came out with a new report his month titled Employee Engagement: Market Review, Buyer’s Guide and Provider Profiles, and here is what jumped off the page at me:
The research shows that organizations currently invest approximately $720 million annually in engagement improvement, including both outsourced and internally developed programs. Only 50 percent of the potential market has been tapped, with half the organizations stating an interest in engagement programs actually investing.”
To put it more simply, organizations are spending nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars per year (emphasis added) trying to improve employee engagement — and that only represents about half of the $1.53 billion that Bersin projects that companies will eventually spend on it.
My take? Never has so much been spent on so very little.
Yes, $720 million is a lot of money to spend on employee engagement, especially when the most recent survey from Towers Watson shows that 63 percent of U.S. workers “are not fully engaged in their work and are struggling to cope with work situations that don’t provide sufficient support.”
Makes you wonder what organizations are getting for their $720 million, doesn’t it?
Can anybody really define “engagement?”
The Bersin report also gives other key trends when it comes to engagement that are worth noting, such as:
- Providers do not agree on how to define employee engagement. In fact, definitions vary dramatically, with elements including commitment, goal alignment, enjoyment, performance, and the antithesis of “burnout” – to name just a few. Buyers need to define what employee engagement means for their organization and select providers that align with that definition.
- Market innovators are integrating engagement into all HR functions. HR leaders increasingly are focused on aligning engagement efforts with business strategy, and they are also integrating engagement with HR programs and organizational operations. From recruiting to building a leadership bench to alumni relations, innovative providers are helping their clients infuse engagement into every step of the employee lifecycle.
- “Big Data” and analytics are on the rise. While most of the engagement providers reviewed in this report offer some way to measure the relationship between engagement and organizational performance, only a few have moved into a new frontier – HR analytics. Since HR analytics enables organizations to optimize workforce performance and fuels continual improvement efforts, buyers should consider their requirements in this area carefully.
Can you improve it if you can’t define it?
For my money, the fact that no one really knows how to define employee engagement is the real bottom line problem when it comes to trying to improve it. If you can’t define it, how the hell can you be expected to nurture and grow it among your employees?
This is just my 2 cents, but this report pinpoints a lot of the mindlessness in today’s American workplace when so much money is spent on improving something as critical employee engagement with such terrible results. Makes you want to get a t-shirt that says something like, “We Spent $700 million on Employee Engagement and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”
Until we get our hands around engagement — defining it, measuring it, appreciating it, leveraging it — we’ll simply be throwing more good money after bad chasing something that everyone knows is good to have but that most organizations don’t have the foggiest clue about how to generate.
The Bersin report, if we look at it closely, may be a good start that heads us in that direction.
Fired from a “job for life”
Of course, there’s a lot more going on than just how much organization’s are spending to improve engagement in the news this week. Here are some HR and workplace-related items you may have missed. This is TLNT’s weekly round-up of news, trends, and insights from the world of talent management. I do it so you don’t have to.
- How much would you pay for an idea? At Southwest Airlines, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, management is looking for ideas from workers that would save the company $5 a day.
- Not who you want handling your food. The Miami Herald reports that nine out of 10 — yes, 90 percent — of Miami restaurant workers do not get sick days, and as a result, 50 percent of them have gone to work sick at some point.
- Does anyone have a “job for life?” A confidant of the late Apple chief Steve Jobs is suing the company for firing him last year. He claims, according to the Los Angeles Times, that Jobs promised him a job for life and that, “This express promise by Steve Jobs was consistent with a practice that Steve Jobs had, acting on behalf of defendant Apple, of promising job security to certain key employees who worked directly with him for many years.”
- How the lack of normal office noise hurts productivity. NPR’s Health Blog notes that some workers find the absence of other workers a problem during vacation season, because the lack of people’s voices make the normal sounds of the office more apparent, and in turn, more distracting.
- Just HOW much money does that new Best Buy CEO make? The Minneapolis Star Tribune does a nice job of breaking down the specifics of the compensation package the new CEO of Best Buy is getting (yes, he gets a $20 million signing bonus). But here’s the kicker: according to The Wall Street Journal, Frenchman Hubert Joly would REALLY get a giant payout (as much as $32 million) if the electronics retailer gets taken over, as is being proposed by the company’s founder, who holds 20 percent of Best Buy’s shares. And you wonder why so many people believe CEOs are grossly overpaid?