Have we been looking at Employee Engagement the wrong way?

The Gallup organization has had most of us chasing Employee Engagement by attempting to get employees more engaged about their jobs. What if we approached it from the other direction? What if we could improve an employee's engagement by making the job itself more interesting, motivating, and engaging?

Dr. Richard Hackman, an expert on team dynamics, developed a theory on Employee Engagement (what he termed “Motivating Potential Score”) by making the job itself more motivating. His formula can help leaders increase their employees' engagement by enhancing the job, not the employee. If you use this mathematical formula to calculate the Engagement (Motivating Potential Score) of any job, you can make every job in your organization more motivating and interesting. Hence your employees can be better engaged.

Here’s how it works.

EE = (SV + TI + TS) x A x F divided by 3

Let’s break it down into its component parts. EE = Employee Engagement. To solve for Employee Engagement, we need to define and assign a number to each variable.

Skill Variety (SV) represents the amount of unique or variable tasks in a job, plus Task Identity (TI) the ability to see a task all the way to completion plus Task Significance (TS) the general importance of a job on society or to that employee.

To calculate the Engagement of any particular role within your organization, you assign each one of those three areas a number between 1 – 6, with 1 being low and 6 being high. As an example, a sales person working from home during the COVID Crisis would likely have moderate Skill Variety, but lower than normal as there is much less client interaction. The Skill Variety in the past may have included meetings, travel, dinners, etc. Those encounters now are limited to the telephone or video conference.

It would have relatively moderate Task Identify, which would largely be the same in a regular work environment as the salesperson would be able to see the sale to its completion.

Finally, Task Significance is fairly high, given our current economy. The ability to continue to sell in this environment is critical. Task Significance could be low or high, depending on the corporate culture, but in this current context it would likely skew a little higher than normal.

Next, you assign a number between 1 and 6 to each of those tasks, add them together and divide that number by 3. (Let’s say we gave Skill Variety a 2, Task Identification a 5, and Task Significance a 5. So, 2 + 5 + 5 = 12). We divide 12 by 3, and we start with a 4.

A = Autonomy. Autonomy is defined by how much control an employee has in the job. In our salesperson example, autonomy is lower than normal. Through no fault of this salesperson, the current context will limit the autonomy of this person’s job severely. In a non-COVID environment, a salesperson might have a 5 or 6 in autonomy as many can set their own schedules, work at their own pace, and make many decisions on their own. In our current climate, with so many restrictions, the autonomy of the position is likely about a 2.

The final computation is F = Feedback. Feedback can be inherent in the job itself. Sales, for example, provides inherent feedback. You know how well you are doing in the job by the number of sales you make. Other jobs require feedback from other sources in order to gauge performance. The higher the feedback in a job, the greater the job satisfaction, per Hackman’s research. In the COVID context, feedback that is inherent in the job would not really change. The pieces of feedback that are variable in this scenario are that of the manager and the customer. If the manager is available to provide feedback to the salesperson, the number would remain high. If the manager was not willing or able to provide adequate feedback, the number would be lower. Similarly, the customer may be more difficult to read in a remote work experience. For our example, we will assume the manager is doing a better than average job at providing feedback and there is good customer interaction. We will assign feedback a 4.

So, here is our math: Employee Engagement = 4 x 2 x 4. For this employee, our number is a 32. How does that compare with other jobs? Sadly, it isn’t bad. The total possible score for this equation is 216, (6 x 6 x 6 = 216). Most jobs, however, hover between 20 and 40. The good news is we can affect our jobs to make them more interesting and better engage our employees. If we analyze the math formula itself, we see that our best areas of impact are Autonomy and Feedback. If we can improve those two scores, we can greatly improve the satisfaction and engagement of our employees, even when they are working remotely.

During this COVID crisis, it is critical to keep our employees engaged. If we can help make the job itself more motivating, we can encourage greater employee engagement. With our best opportunity for improvement in engagement resting largely with Autonomy and Feedback, those are two areas we can bolster our communication and energies to keep our employees engaged and our cultures strong.

#leadership #employeeengagement #everythingisculture