The Myth of Resiliency (Understanding Employee Engagement--Part III)

Resiliency is a mythical state invented by HR and career counselors to address the crazy state of the work world. In fact, it is a concept whose time never came. Today's employees don't want to be resilient; they want to be gainfully employed. Like parents on the brink of divorce who spout platitudes about how the kids are better off with two happy, but separate parents then in a single household with warring factions, nobody wants to actually ask the kids how they feel. And employee resilience is just as mythical.

Members of today's workforce are not resilient; they just cope because they have to. But they don't have to--or maybe can't--be happy about it. Expecting engagement under the current circumstances is unrealistic and usually results in a charade. Employers clearly want employees to be engaged, and employees know better then to disappoint. So they play along. But that's not engagement, and anyone looking just below the surface sees the anger, anxiety and frustration that employees experience as a result of "living on the edge."

Let's scrap resiliency as a desired state for workers. There's a simple formula for keeping employees engaged: handle them with care. If organizations didn't keep clobbering people with threats of imminent joblessness, rigid work structures and untenable job responsibilities, employees would be more engaged. Engagement is a state that comes from a sense of satisfaction from one's work, a regularly affirmed belief that one's contribution matters and a sense of trust between employers and employees. Unless employees can see those elements in their work situations, they will go to default mode: look busy and keep looking.

Otherwise Engaged (Understanding Employee Engagement--Part I)

Many of our clients are expressing concern over the issue of employee engagement. It's an amorphous issue, but they suspect that their employees are "enrolled"(to use Peter Senge's term), but not engaged. They are worried that while their people are showing up on time, mouthing the right words and smiling at their jokes, all is not truly well. They want their employees to take their relationship with the organization to the next level; they want them to be committed.

The first step in tackling the challenge of engagement is to understand why it's not happening. Engagement means commitment, and, for most, that means a two-way relationship. Until employers begin to invest in workers in ways that matter to their employees, these employees will not engage. It's not that employees don't want to, but they are otherwise engaged right now: they are engaged in self-protection, a healthy response to an environment in which they rightly believe they have no control over what will happen. They will not bond to an organization when they feel the employment bargain is unfair or when they know that the organization stands to sever that connection without cause at some time. Without question, engagement and secure employment (or an employee-accepted version of that situation) are linked.