You Can't Count on Emotion to Sustain Engagement...Thankfully
Ever Since our friends at the Gallup organization came up with their famous Q12 many 
professionals in the consulting world have become obsessed with further identifying and refining the "drivers" of engagement and practices focused on improving overall levels of engagement have become the rage in businesses across the country.
The Q12 as you may already know asks 12 questions that purportedly measure strong feelings of employee engagement. There is reportedly a strong correlation between high scores on the Q12 and superior job performance.
Based on their initial work in the area of employee engagement Gallup, using an extraordinary amount of data, determined that Nationally, in 2005, engaged employees made up 28% of the work force globally, not-engaged employees made up 54%, and actively disengaged made up 17%. With numbers like these it is no wonder Gallup has gone on to develop an enormously successful human resource consulting program.
I believe the Gallup organization through their research and others doing similar research have done the world of business a tremendous favor by uncovering this provocative information. What I am not as certain of is whether the conclusions they arrived at are equally valuable or valid.
My own suspicion is that what Gallup has determined is that only 28% of the players in our national workforce have found work and workplaces that are both truly satisfying for them. This may be as much a function of commitment as it is a response to external factors. The people in this fraction of the workforce just keep moving and/or communicating until they find what they are seeking, possibly following some vision in the manner expressed by George Bernard Shaw
"Reasonable men adapt to the world. Unreasonable men adapt the world to themselves. That's why all progress depends on unreasonable men."
And I am betting it didn't always feel good, until it did!
It just may be that the majority (54%) of our workforce has “settled” for something less than satisfying and 17% of the workforce is simply pissed off for any number of reasons, perhaps even resentful about having to work at all.
Cause and effect are tricky questions. When it comes to people and their behavior of one thing I am fairly certain, relying on strong feelings, emotions, for anything, is like laying a foundation in quick sand. The divorce rate in our country may be more indicative of this belief than any piece of research I could site. Everyone becomes engaged when they “feel” like they are in love. Then they marry and the eventual strength of a marriage comes from the way we behave when we no longer “feel” like we are in love. Will we remain engaged? Can we operate from the commitments we have made and have that be sufficient to sustain engagement? Here is an example from my own life of what I am pointing to here:
I don't do yard work. It's not that I am lazy, if the task is going to the grocery store, picking up the dry cleaning, taking out the trash, driving the truck to the recycling center, just let me know it needs to be done and I am on it.. Loading the dishwasher and scrubbing pans after dinner are actually two things I find relaxing. I just don't do yard work; not mowing the lawn yard work, that's fun. No, I mean yard work, like planting flowers, spreading compost, pruning and worst of all, weeding! But I do love my wife and she really enjoys having an attractive yard and works hard at it. As an expression of how much I respect her commitment to the yard we have created a game. She’ll want something done in the yard and I ask if what she wants is “yard work. She of course then says “no” and I say, “Well all right then, I’ll do it.” This works for us and especially because it gives us time together. Except for weeding! We have an unwritten rule that under no circumstances will I engage in weeding.
A week or so ago my wife set out to do some weeding in the rhododendron garden and her back cramped up. I knew she was counting on getting this bit of weeding done so from that place where I am profoundly related to my wife I said, “You know I do not do weeding but I am going to make an exception this week because of your short term disability.” I got down on my hands and knees and for two hours pulled weeds and did a presentable job. Did I have a strong feeling of connection to the task after all? Hardly! In fact I have no more interest now or connection to weeding than I ever did. Yet, because of the commitments my wife and I share this was a satisfying experience. It just didn’t feel like it!
- Where are you waiting for the right feeling before taking action?
- What factors about your working environment have you been putting up with rather than making a request or saying what's on your mind?
- Take a look at where you are working and what you are doing right now? Is this it for you? If not are you willing to take action to get it to be or find another place that will?
Interesting conclusions on the research, Mike. I think you could extend that to the engagement findings of just about any of the research firms that track/measure engagement. When we're so deeply involved in "business consulting," it's a hazard to immediately relate every human reaction/action to work. As you point out, this is a fallacy. We're much more likely to bring our personality, expectations, and desires into the workplace and have it affect our attitude toward work, engagement, etc., rather than the other way around.