How Traditional Attempts to Increase Employee Engagement Can Crush Productivity

EngageRocket CEO CheeTung Leong writes that employee engagement efforts, with the associated annual cycle of measurement via a poll, usually end in failure, reports Forbes . "For the average manager, the survey is an unwelcome aberration to their 'business-as-usual' (BAU) baseline," Leong notes. "They track what directly affects how their performance is measured: number of widgets produced, the yield on materials used, safety incidents, project milestones, budget, and others. Therefore, the steps they take directly impact some or all of these numbers. They don't base their plans on six-month-old survey data." Leong cites the work of Huggy Rao and Robert Sutton on how companies can scale excellence by handling the "cognitive load" of an organization. "While collecting employee engagement data is important in helping leaders motivate their teams better, the load created may not always be worth the insight generated," he says. "It also can create a drag on productivity as capacity that could be used in alternative programs is channeled towards the administrative burden of running surveys." Leong thinks "pulse surveying" is a more effective employee engagement model, in that it allows teams to self-regulate, managers to monitor the impact of their leadership style, and human resources to stage interventions to be more strategically targeted at workers that consistently find themselves needing help.