Engagement Is the Score You Cannot Fix Directly - The SPRIITE Series/Article 8 of 9

A company I worked with ran an engagement survey, scored poorly, and spent the following year on the response. There was a recognition program, a revised set of values on the wall, a monthly all-hands with better food, and a suggestion box that was genuinely read. The leadership team worked hard at it and meant every bit of it.

The next survey came back roughly where the first one had. The owner was discouraged and slightly angry, and his read was that his people were hard to please.

We went back through the seven conditions with his leadership team, and the picture was not subtle. Two departments had no clear ownership of their most important outcome. The reporting his managers needed arrived on the eighteenth of the following month. Nobody had been trained for a new role in three years. They were telling him, through the only instrument he had given them, what it was like to work inside the conditions he had built.

Engagement is the seventh condition and often a result

Engagement asks whether people feel enough ownership and purpose to give you more than the minimum, and whether your read on that is honest rather than hopeful.

It belongs in the assessment. It is also the one condition that behaves differently from the other six, and getting that difference right saves owners a year and a fair amount of money.

The other six are mostly inputs. You can change structure in a meeting, information in a month, training in a quarter. Engagement is often the result of the first six more than a separate problem of its own, which means a good deal of it responds to them rather than to direct effort. When people know who owns what, have workable processes, are resourced, are informed in time, can improve their own work, and have been prepared for their jobs, engagement tends to take care of a large part of itself. It is still its own condition, with its own causes, and the next section is about reading which situation you are in.

This is why so many well-intentioned engagement initiatives change nothing. They are addressing the readout instead of what produced it.

What engagement does tell you

None of this makes the score useless. It is telling you something specific, and it is worth reading correctly.

A low engagement score with high scores everywhere else is unusual and genuinely informative. When it happens, look at leadership behavior, fairness, or something specific and local like one manager, one broken promise, or one layoff handled badly. In that pattern the score is pointing at something the other six do not capture.

A low engagement score alongside two or three other low scores is the far more common pattern, and there the engagement number is confirming rather than revealing. It tells you the conditions you already identified are being felt by the people living inside them.

And a high engagement score with low scores elsewhere is worth treating carefully. Sometimes it means you have loyal people absorbing a great deal of friction on your behalf, which is a real asset and also a temporary one. Sometimes it means the instrument was not anonymous enough to be honest.

Most leaders are reading their own hopes

The second half of the definition matters as much as the first. You need an honest read, and most leaders do not have one.

Owners have systematically better information about the people who seek them out and systematically worse information about everyone else. The people who talk to you are the people who are comfortable talking to you, and they are not a representative sample of your company. I have watched confident owners be genuinely shocked by a resignation that six people in the building had seen coming for months.

The practical corrections are unremarkable. Score engagement separately with the team rather than assuming, keep it anonymous enough that the answers can be unflattering, and pay attention to the departures that surprise you. A resignation nobody predicted is data about your visibility as much as about the person leaving.

Scoring engagement honestly

A two looks like this. Discretionary effort has gone. People do the job and go home, which is their right and also a signal. You cannot name what any given person on your team is working toward. Turnover in a key group is higher than you would have predicted, and higher than you can explain.

A four looks like this. People raise problems before they become emergencies. Your best people can describe where they are trying to go and believe this company is a reasonable place to get there. Departures rarely surprise you, because the conversation happened well before the decision did.

If your engagement number came back low alongside two or three others, my advice is to leave it alone for one cycle and work the two lowest conditions among the other six instead. Then measure again. In most of the companies I have watched do that, engagement moved without anyone having addressed it directly, which tells you a good deal about what it was measuring in the first place.

The owner in the opening story eventually did exactly that, and he was more surprised by the result than I was. If your people seem disengaged, look hard at what you handed them before you conclude anything about how they feel about you. And if an outside voice would help you get an honest read, my door is open.