One of the most common mistakes companies make is to approach engagement as a sporadic exercise in making their employees feel happy, usually around the time when a survey is coming up.
Employees need more than a fleeting, warm-fuzzy feeling and a good paycheck (even if it helps them respond positively on employee engagement survey questions) to invest in their work and achieve more for their company.
The manager or team leader alone accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement.
One of Gallup’s biggest discoveries
People want purpose and meaning from their work. They want to be known for what makes them unique. This is what drives employee engagement.
And they want relationships, particularly with a manager who can coach them to the next level. This is who drives employee engagement.
When engaging employees, leaders need to know a key fact about today’s workplace: It has evolved. Gallup research reveals that to perform at their highest, employees need something different from their work than they used to.
The Past
The Future
- Paycheck
- Satisfaction
- Boss
- Annual Review
- Weaknesses
- Job
- Purpose
- Development
- Coach
- Ongoing Conversations
- Strengths
- Life
What Causes an Employee Engagement Strategy to Fail?
Most engagement strategies fail because they aren’t treated as core business priorities. When engagement is siloed in HR or reduced to survey scores, organizations miss the deeper drivers of performance and culture.
Common reasons employee engagement efforts fail:
- Lack of executive ownership — Leaders don’t model or prioritize engagement.
- Overcomplicated strategies — Focus drifts from core employee needs.
- Misleading metrics — Using “percent favorable” scores inflates results.
- Action gaps — Surveys are overused, and follow-through is inconsistent.
Nearly 80% of employees worldwide are still not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, despite increased effort from companies.
The greatest cause of a workplace engagement program’s failure is this: Employee engagement is widely considered “an HR thing.”
Engagement Needs Buy-In From Leaders And Managers To Succeed.
Many executive-level leaders have not embraced engagement in a way that communicates its importance as a shared responsibility to employees and holds managers accountable for its deployment.
The result is that some leaders believe they have exhausted “engagement” as a performance lever before they truly explore its full potential to change their business.
These leaders consistently experience low engagement, or they plateau and eventually decline, despite repeated attempts to boost scores. Other times, they have high engagement numbers, but their business results tell a different story.
At a loss for explanations, leaders may blame the tool, the measurement, the philosophy or environmental factors that they believe make their problems unique.
But the apparent failure of employee engagement efforts is likely due to the ineffective implementation of employee engagement programs.
Source: Gallup
