The Flawed Assumption Behind the Question
I was just asked “How should we digitize tracking employee engagement to reduce the management burden?”
There is a dangerously flawed assumption in this question that engagement can be digitized.
Measuring employee engagement cannot be boiled down to a simple equation based engagement metric. Employees must be actively engaged by their managers in order to assess engagement because people are enormously complicated. Reducing engagement to a numerical metric is overly simplistic like reducing friendships to a 1-10 score. It is impersonal and unfriendly. Each employee must be uniquely addressed and managed.
What Real Engagement Management Looks Like
Quality management is not scalable through technology but only through a managerial cascade down the ranks with demonstrated proper listening, learning, and leadership, reaching every rung on the corporate ladder.
Consistent 90-day reviews where employees are encouraged to voice their concerns and frustrations, which are heard and consequently acted on or more properly informed, will lead to an ‘engaged’ workforce who exerts their intellectual willpower to the company’s problems.
In short, when standards of quality management are baked into the company culture, the engagement problem will solve itself.
The short version.
- Can employee engagement be digitized?
- No. Reducing engagement to a numerical metric is like reducing friendships to a 1-to-10 score: impersonal and far too simple for how complicated people are. Employees have to be actively engaged by their managers before engagement can be assessed at all.
- How does engagement management scale?
- Through a managerial cascade down the ranks, with demonstrated listening, learning, and leadership reaching every rung of the ladder. Quality management does not scale through technology.
- What produces an engaged workforce?
- Consistent 90-day reviews where employees are encouraged to voice concerns and frustrations, which are then heard and either acted on or properly answered. Bake quality management into the culture and the engagement problem solves itself.
