Are you unwittingly confusing employee participation with employee engagement?
On this off-cycle Election Day, you'll undoubtedly hear about how abysmally low voter turnout is in most states, excepting Virginia and New Jersey. But is high voter turnout the best measure of a "successful" electoral process? Similarly, when companies tout high "employee engagement," are they mistakenly elevating mindlessโif not forcedโemployee participation to a level greater than it really is?
The headline: ๐๐ก๐๐ญ ๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ฆ๐๐ญ๐ ๐๐ก๐๐ง๐ ๐? ๐๐ ๐๐จ๐ญ๐๐ซ๐ฌ ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ก ๐๐ฌ๐ฌ๐ฎ๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐๐ค๐ฌ๐๐๐ญ ๐ข๐ง ๐๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐ง๐จ๐ซ'๐ฌ ๐๐๐๐ (by Brian McCrone of NBC10 Philadelphia)
The goal: to (๐)๐ซ๐จ๐ฐ, (๐)๐ซ๐จ๐ญ๐๐๐ญ, ๐๐ง๐ (๐)๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ญ๐๐ข๐ง success by pondering these 3 questions throughout your day:
๐ก Are you placing a higher value on "participation" than on genuine engagement?
๐ก In what ways are your employee polls protecting leadership's existing biases?
๐ก What is the most sustainable approach to employee engagement for your organization?
For an expanded discussion on the impacts that both political and corporate electionsโand, in turn, transitions of powerโcan have on your stakeholders, check out this November 2020 episode of The Energy Detox.
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Transcript
(AI training in progress; please excuse any errors)
Hello and welcome to another live edition of the energy detox a petroleum based blend of leadership conversations guaranteed to boost your professional and personal output by flushing away the hidden and often toxic barriers to peak performance. I'm your host, Joe Sinnott, a chemical engineer, executive coach and 16 year energy industry veteran helping you tap into the same resources fueling today's most successful and sustainable leaders. And today, we're taking a headline related to Election Day here in the United States, and in particular, a headline from one of the two states in our union that has a gubernatorial election going on today, which means that there might actually be some meaningful turnout, because historically on off cycle elections, like we're having this year, turnout is fairly abysmal. Very few people are turning out to the polls to vote for what in many cases are judgeships, and school boards and mayors and some of the smaller races that don't attract, of course, the national attention and headlines. And of course, we're also told each year how important these elections are. And they are because in many cases, they might have a more direct impact on you and your life than the national headlines that bring 150 or 60 million people out to the polls to vote. But that being said, we can still look to today's election and talk about the impact of turnout, and why it matters, how it matters and how, at least in national conversations, perhaps the focus on turnout is causing people to miss what is more important, and that is voter engagement, voter awareness, voter involvement, and not merely just showing up to the polls to pull a lever or push a button or fill in a bubble, or sitting at home and filling out some paperwork. Voting is obviously important. There's no question about that. But it begs the question, what is more important, an Informed Electorate? Who is making a conscious decision and conscious effort to vote for something or someone? Or is it more important for them to just show up at the polls? Now, obviously, as has been the case, here on the energy detox, we're not going to dive into that specific topic and that specific headline, because there's no shortage of talking heads, who can talk about the importance of consciousness when it comes to voting. We are, however, going to weave this into a conversation about the energy industry, and in particular about energy industry leaders who might be again confusing participation of their employees with true engagement of their employees. And to kick things off, we're going to take one headline, as we've been doing each morning to ask you a series of questions. And that headline today comes from New Jersey, where several polls indicate that climate change is not the top issue. And if you go ahead and read this article from NBC 10, in Philadelphia, you'll see that the polls that were conducted, were meant to figure out what the top issue was for folks. So it wasn't a forced ranking, it was merely a survey to say, okay, out of these 31 options, from climate to COVID, to taxes to social issues, whatever the case may be, what is the most important and climate change came in somewhere? I think 37 Out of, or 27 out of 31? Very much towards the bottom so low. In fact, I don't think it would register on on Family Feud where you least need to get to two out of 100 or or, you know, at least 2% of the respondents. That being said, it begins to question the narrative that at least we're being told, especially as 2500 leaders from across the globe gather in Scotland this week to talk about climate change, which we are told is by far the most significant issue of our time. So where's the disconnect? Where's the disconnect between what leaders are expecting their constituents to believe and to be primarily focused on and what they're actually focused on, and this is coming again, from a state a coastal state like New Jersey, who has felt the impacts of weather for its entire existence. This is a state where again, people will point to years ago Superstorm Sandy that came and caused billions of dollars of damage, but yet you have the state where the leaders and what they're being told to, you know, to or what they're telling their constituents, what they're saying about climate change is not reflected in the polling. So again, there's a disconnect, which brings us back to you as a leader in the energy industry and causing you hopefully to question whether or not the information that you have the the polls that you have out there. Are they actually reflecting what your constituents what your stakeholders what your employees are believing, or are they somehow misconstruing What your stakeholders actually want and desire and need to serve your own purpose and your own biases. And so with that sort of long introduction here,
05:08
let's come back to the three questions that we want to ask you today to help you and your organization grow, protect and sustain success. And that first question today is, are you placing a higher value on participation of your employees? Then true engagement? Or even taking it a step further than true involvement of your employees? And are you sending out surveys and, again, polls, essentially, causing your employees to to again, check a box or fill out a survey, so that you can have some statistics that then ultimately, should help you make better decisions about how to run your company and how to increase engagement. But the problem is that I encounter when conversing with individuals, particularly those in the Human Resources world, is that many cases, these companies that are spending a good amount of money to put out these employee surveys to put out these polls? are placing too high of a value on the fact that oh, 90% of our people responded, Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. But what percentage of those actually responded fully? And consciously? Are you actually extracting value from that conversation? Or are people going into it scared or concerned and not going in with a desire to transparently and openly share what they actually think? Or you're just getting people that believe, truly or falsely that the responses are not anonymous, and they're, they're giving the answers that they think that people want to see? And again, the answers are across the board, and some companies do a better job than others, and some of the third party organizations that will help encourage employee engagement and put together these surveys do a better job than others. But at the end of the day, are the leaders asking the question of whether participation in these things is really something that they should pat their backs on? Similarly, in a system of government? Should leaders really be patting themselves on the back? Because voter participation is sky high? You know, and again, I think the answer to that question can come from history where you have many regimes throughout history that tout, you know, 100%, voter participation rate of 99% of votes for the likes of ups on Hussein, I think, was One famous example. And we can look elsewhere where so called democracies are not really democracies, and you have leaders pointing to statistics and metrics that obviously misconstrue the opinion, the will, and the, you know, the true engagement of the population. And so too, for you, as a leader, regardless of where you are in the organization, are you going through the motions, and increasing participation in quarterly performance reviews, and get employee engagement surveys, or maybe participation in activities that bring people together and tabling and all of these things, and you're very proud of this, and you're putting it all in your ESG reports and your sustainability reports, and you're touting how engaged your people and when in reality, they're just showing up, they're just checking the box, they don't even know why they're there necessarily. And again, just like in an election, if you had 100% voter turnout, but a significant portion of those voters don't know what they're voting for, they're just showing up. There's nothing necessarily noble in that there's nothing necessarily valuable in that exercise for you as a leader, if they are not conscious of what they're doing, if they're not involved, and if they're not engaged. So again, ask yourself, are you simply growing your numbers so that you can pat yourself on the back for some sort of false metric around engagement? Or are you truly, truly listening and truly doing things that will extract the actual opinions of the people instead of forcing your own opinions down their throats? Which leads us to the next question, and that is, in what ways are your employee polls protecting your existing biases? Because it happens, right? It happens in politics all the time, the way that a poll is worded can obviously skew the responses. So to with this poll out of New Jersey, again, as I said at the outset, this wasn't a forest rank poll of opinions that, you know, may have firmly said that climate change is the number two thing on people's minds, but taxes and taxes, I think might be number one, COVID. And other issues might be, you know, affirm, number one, and maybe climate change is consistently two, or three or four. Well, again, the way that poll was conducted didn't allow that to bubble up to the surface. And so too, with you, are you so focused on what you perceive to be the true number one issue that your employees have, and that's preventing them from being productive and engaged, that you forget about maybe items number two, and three and four, that might be more pressing, or that are percolating, or that are going to be long term issues. Obviously, over the last year and a half, you've undoubtedly been focused on work from home related issues and how to engage remote workforce and that makes sense, but are you missing sort of the underlying issues that are going to continue for the next several years, regardless of where things land from a remote work standpoint, regardless
09:51
of where things land from a COVID standpoint, regardless of where things land, from an energy volatility standpoint, and consolidation standpoint, and and all of those Things will kind of work themselves out. But what's under the surface? What are people really concerned about? Are they concerned about the actual quality of the managers that you have an engagement that your managers have the awareness that your managers have? Because if you're not focused on those items, and if you're not extracting that, and if your polls and your surveys, maybe have that information, but you're too focused on what you already perceived to be the problem, and you're just using these surveys as a way to continue investing whatever time and energy and money? Well, again, you're asking for trouble. And you're asking for an approach that is on sustainable. Which brings us to the third and final question today, which is, what is the most sustainable approach to employee engagement for your organization. And, again, there's a menu item, there's a menu of potential ways to increase employee engagement, obviously, some of the most important ones and most effective ones regard getting good, solid feedback, not just having people fill out a survey, but actually engaging with them, one on one, not just going in and having a performance review, but actually having what might you might call a stay interview, right, actually getting into the heart of what people want, and need to feel engaged and to be more productive. Are you having those individual conversations? Are your leaders having those conversations? And if not, why not? Because you can have, again, 100% participation in some employee engagement survey, but maybe 20% participation with a sampling of employees who are really going to get into the weeds, we're really going to go open up, we're really going to go multiple levels deep, perhaps far deeper than they would otherwise. And a survey could yield far more impactful and sustainable results, then again, leaning on some of the trite, and quite frankly, easy methods, whether they're a Survey Monkey, or whether there some, you know, six, if not seven figure engagement exercise that companies might engage in every couple years. So again, ask yourself, of all the tools at your disposal, what are the most impactful and all upon at least in my experience here again, as a coach, know, by far the most impactful exercises to increase true employee engagement, and not just participation are some variation of 360 degree feedback interviews, I enjoy this thoroughly enjoy having conversations with people who are able to open up about their leadership, whether it's about an individual or about a group of individuals, when you have a normal human conversation with somebody, the amount of insight and information that you gain far exceeds any poll far exceeds any survey far exceeds anything else that you're going to do. That isn't a true human conversation, where people are able to go multiple levels deep and share what's really on their mind, instead of having to force rank or choose from a list of 31 items, what's most important. So again, with all of that, I encourage you to ask these questions to to avoid mixing up mere participation with true engagement, and involvement. And if you're interested in hearing an expanded conversation about the impacts of not just state national and local elections, but also changes within companies, which where you will continue to see changes in leadership changing of the guard, and in some cases, proxy battles that lead to new leaders, I encourage you to go ahead and click on the link here in the show description. That'll bring you to a discussion from last November, on the heels of the national election, where we discussed how transitions of power aren't necessarily intended to be smooth, how sometimes you need to challenge what was already in place, and have some some Ochita some some discomfort there so that you can find yourself in a more sustainable, long term place if you will, to have long term sustainable results instead of merely going through the motions and checking the boxes on a transition. So with all that being said, again, I encourage you to check out that link if you're interested. And if nothing else, I thank you for tuning in again to another live edition of the energy detox. I welcome you back again tomorrow morning for another live edition where we will take one energy related headline and continue asking you questions. And of course above all, I encourage you if you are so inclined to go ahead and print out a sample ballot, check out some of the smaller races that you might not even be familiar with in your community and go out and vote go out and be an active winning conscious participant in today's election. Even if you're not part of the the high profile states. They're like Virginia and New Jersey that actually have something that'll be Garner national headlines here for the next couple of days. So with that, thank you again, have an excellent day and take care