The Future Of Engagement

A keynote from 2015 that led to the Paradoxes of Engagement series

I gave a keynote on 2015-06-17 at the Employee Engagement and Awards conference in NYC. This is a loose version of my notes from that talk.

This will be included in the compilation of Paradoxes of Engagement essays that I will be publishing in the next month or so. Paid subscribers will get immediate and free access to that ebook.

As you read, reflect on the fact that these issues were fairly well understood in 2015, and today, in 2022, we really haven’t made much progress on engagement. Alas.

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My topic today is The Future of Engagement, but I start with the present, where employee engagement is pretty horrible. How horrible? Very horrible. And why? One big reason: bad bosses.

• Only 21% feel appreciated at work, and 49% are not satisfied with their direct supervisor ¹

• An Aarhus University study² found a strong correlation between worker depression and the sense of being treated unfairly by immediate supervisors.

• Bad management is cited by over a third³ as the reason they’d quit a job and rate their boss’ performance as poor or fair.

• 60% percent of employees believe bad bosses (those who are demanding, overbearing, and mean) have the greatest negative impact on work-life balance ⁴

• Research by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman has shown⁵ a straight-line correlation between levels of employee engagement and our measure of the overall effectiveness of their supervisors (as judged not just by the employees themselves but by their bosses, colleagues, and other associates on 360 assessments).

• Researchers showed that when Sears employee satisfaction increased 5% customer satisfaction improved 1.3%, which for $40 billion Sears meant a $250 million increase in sales.

Peter Drucker wrote,

Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.

We have to clear that up, and treat management as a necessary evil: only as much as needed, and no more.

The future of engagement, therefore, hangs on reworking the ‘reporting’ relationship, loosening the bonds between the boss and the bossed, and decreasing the anxieties and fear that this overloaded relationship has.

What if we aspired to end first-line managers, and structured around greater autonomy for nearly everyone? What if other factors turned out to be more powerful than even the benefits of good bosses?

Diversity and Inclusion

McKinsey⁶ found executive board diversity to be a huge force multiplier:

The findings were startlingly consistent: for companies ranking in the top quartile of executive-board diversity, ROEs were 53 percent higher, on average, than they were for those in the bottom quartile.

Inclusion and diversity when paired, have an enormous impact on engagement: the top versus the bottom quartile of inclusiveness can have 82 times higher engagement⁷, based on a Roundpegg study⁸ [8] looking at companies like Nike.

So, diversity and inclusion – together – can have an enormous impact on engagement of workers, and that’s where companies should be pushing.

Cultural Myths

A great deal of ink and breath is expended on empty thoughts about corporate culture. 'Culture’ has become a grab bag of anything that anybody ever thought, including a lot of groundless opinions.

Here’s an example: the Shared Vision meme.

When it comes to company culture, it’s important to share the same vision across your organization. - Alyssa Retallick, Glassdoor

“Share’ in this case can come to mean 'impose’. One continuing element of the non-democratic nature of work is the premise that there should be a single 'vision’ for the business coming from the founder or upper management, and that everyone else should accept this vision unquestioningly and hew to its implications.