I recently commented on David Bowle’s post about what he wants to hear about at SHRM 2011. He was kind enough to post a comment in response, and it seems we have much to discuss!
In this response, I pose David several questions.
First, a clarification
David, would you mind expanding on the difference between “feeling states” and “acting states”? Specifically, what makes happiness a feeling state and engagement an acting state? I think I understand the distinction you are drawing. However, my understanding of those states doesn’t fit with my understanding of the difference between happiness and engagement.
On societal factors affecting engagement
I believe we are both on the same page in referring to deeper level within cultures – the closely-held mindsets associated with them. I count among these mindsets (which apply to different extents across cultures) the belief that freedom of speech is a natural right, as are feelings of class barriers and social rigidity. I merely used governmental processes as examples of manifestations of these beliefs.
My point is that a lack of mirroring may lead to disengagement. Perhaps this is why the USA only has average engagement – because the deep-seated belief that freedom of speech is a right is not reflected in the culture of many organizations. And perhaps this is why Google is taken as an example of the “best of the best” because of its apparent openness.
As for Germany, what makes you think that it would be a “pillar of engagement” because of its “powerhouse companies high wages and huge export success”? I disagree with the logic of this argument. Just because engagement predicts performance does not mean that performance requires engagement. In fact, Germany appears to be a counterexample to that claim.
If Germany’s (or any country’s) culture works against engagement, as you say, then I would expect their engagement to be low. I could not, however, draw any predictions as to the productivity of the country. The interesting question then becomes, “What drives the success of German companies, if not engagement?”
On the top-down and bottom-up
I am not saying that feelings of engagement are “top-down feelings”. My apologies if I was unclear. It certainly is the worker’s choice whether or not to engage. My question to you is, what makes an employee choose to engage?
On a related note, I am certainly not claiming that we can “teach” people drive through happiness. Nor is it an employer’s responsibility to instill drive in them. But what if you could help someone build their drive? What if you could use the research on the causes and benefits of happiness at work to help your employees increase their motivation? And thereby increase their performance and fulfill their potential? Wouldn’t that be a worthwhile thing to do?
Simon OK lets see if I can go through the points you raise:
Happiness is a core human feeling like sadness, anger etc. but engagement is something you do. That’s important because the question here is whether a feeling (happiness) translates into action. If it does then I can get more excited about happiness at work. But some can be “happy” acting in ways which if they bring this to work might not make them too productive. For example, some might report being happy while sitting around doing very little, watching TV, working on Facebook all day. Do you see my problem here? I have told you that the happiest countries do not have the most engaged workers. Just today I saw a new article saying that Denmark was the happiest country in the world…again…and its all based on having lots of friends, leisure time and so on, not on take home pay or anything like that. But Denmark is only average for worker engagement….meaning that happiness, in a country at least, is NOT translating to something which we know is a productivity driver. Why does this matter? Because we as consultants have to sell these approaches to leaders and they are hard nosed and need evidence that this is worthwhile. When I see a CEO I can roll out all kinds of research about engagement and high morale driving (yes driving, not just correlated with) lots of great performance things at work; this gives them a reason to buy in.
OK Germany: I live there part time but have also consulted there, in this area (morale/engagement). They are successful because they: 1) work hard! 2) are very disciplined 3) focus on quality 4) have great apprenticeship programs, especially for engineering etc. 5) have a generally good education system. But they also have a rather rigid culture which means that people who stay at holiday homes near where I live in the Alps still call their landladies the formal “Sie” (you) even after going there for 20 years! This carries over to work, big time. Can they have high engagement, yes for sure and I have helped some get there. Imagine this powerhouse country with high engagement? Unbeatable, and I have seen this in action.
I was a bit tongue in cheek when saying that in spite of high wages and so on they have low engagement; that is a common fallacy. But purely from a correlation point of view, since the engagement-performance connection is so high, you would expect to see it in reverse. Mostly you do, but there are always exceptions. Of course within Germany there are superbly well managed companies like BMW, with such a great internal culture.
What makes a worker choose to engage? This has two components: 1) the willingness and ability to engage, driven by personality, experience etc. 2) the conditions at work being such that the worker feels good there, good enough to want to “go the extra mile”, do her best, learn as much as possible, fully invest her mind and heart in the job, and so on.
I am all in favo(u)r of anyone helping people to find that place inside where they want to and are able to engage…since that is one of the essential ingredients. But I wonder if that can be “learned” in a day training or even a weekend. You even have a piece up today on Twitter about the DNA of happiness and serotonin levels. Doesn’t this further limit what people can “learn” if they dont have it? As am employer I would look for drive in a person from Day 1, and not hire people who needed to learn to have it. Doesn’t your DNA piece only reinforce that argument?
very best to you, and enjoying this chat a great deal…yes, fully engaged….
David
http://www.moraleatwork.com
Hi David
Thank you for the thoughtful response!
You made several important points in your response. By building upon your points, I will clarify the meaning of happiness at work, as well as its relationship to engagement.
“Happiness is a core human feeling like sadness, anger etc.”
There are multiple types of happiness. On one end of the spectrum there is emotional happiness. This is the “core human feeling” of which you speak. Emotional happiness is generally defined as a burst of positive affect, usually in response to the positive appraisal of an event (real, remembered, or imagined). Emotional happiness is short-term in duration, rarely lasting more than a few minutes. “Happy episodes” may occur frequently, and may be combined with positive mood to create a sense of sustained happiness, but emotional happiness has generally been found to fluctuate significantly over the course of a day.
We do not focus on emotional happiness, for two reasons. First, it is all but impossible to create sustainable emotional happiness (there are illegal drugs that!). Second, research does not support emotional happiness as a driver of performance.
On the other end of the spectrum you have trait happiness. Trait happiness is characterized by optimism and a “generally positive outlook” on life. Trait happiness is generally stable across the lifetime, although gradual shifts over the years have been observed.
We do not focus on trait happiness. First, it is very difficult to create lasting increases in trait happiness. Significant events, such as winning the lottery or suffering serious injury, have been shown to have only moderate effects on trait happiness. Even such drastic events had much weaker than expected – to the point where research initially stated that they had no such effect! Second, I have yet to find research supporting the effect of intraindividual changes in trait happiness on performance. That said, I would be surprised if the findings could go very far beyond “hire optimists rather than pessimists”.
In the middle of the spectrum you have mindset happiness. Mindset happiness is characterized motivation, energy, enthusiasm, and resilience. It also includes elements of the positive outlook of trait happiness and is associated with more frequent emotional happiness. Unlike emotional happiness, mindset happiness is relatively stable over the medium-term (weeks to months). And unlike trait happiness, it is sensitive to change through surprisingly practical interventions. Take the gratitude journal, a well-known “happiness booster”. Researchers have found that completing a gratitude journal only a few weeks yielded significant increases in mindset happiness… which lasted up to six months after the end of journaling.
We focus on mindset happiness. Mindset happiness is characterized by motivation, energy, enthusiasm, and resilience, which are most certainly tied to performance. And mindset happiness can be built through focused yet practical work, with long-lasting results.
“But some can be ‘happy’ acting in ways which if they bring this to work might not make them too productive”
I completely agree. And this is why we focus on happiness at work, not happiness at life. Happiness at life is a perfectly good thing, and may very well be related to happiness at work. But there is a meaningful difference between the two. And, unlike happiness at life, happiness at work is tied to performance.
When we talk about happiness at work, we are specifically referring to happiness at work. The items of our measure, the iPPQ, refer specifically to the workplace. And our interventions focus specifically on the workplace. We do include the Subjective Well-Being Scale as a measure of happiness at life, but only as a comparison measure. What we are interested in is the mindset that make employees feel motivated to excel at their jobs, gives them the energy and enthusiasm to perform at their best, and the resilience to overcome challenges.
“Engagement is something you do.”
If engagement is specifically “something you do”, then it must be a specific set of actions, or categories of behavior. What specific actions are engagement? My understanding is that engagement is characterized by:
– Absorbing oneself in one’s work
– Approaching one’s job with energy/vigor/enthusiasm
– Displaying commitment to one’s job/organization/career
– Achieving flow
– Communicating with colleagues and management
– Being a productive team player
– Giving “discretionary effort”; going above and beyond
I’m sure this list is not comprehensive, but I do not think I am too far off the mark.
Isn’t this list the very definition of generalized high performance? Aren’t these all the things that a high-performing individual does in a modern organization that an acceptably performing employee may not? If that’s the case, then engagement as an action is just high performance. And when someone works to build engagement, they’re really just working to build high performance. Which is great. But it implies that engagement isn’t a unique approach, it’s just another name for what people have been doing for years.
Needless to say, this section presents a pretty bold-faced challenge. And I am more than open to rebuttal. Here is my question: What are the specific actions which define engagement but are NOT characteristics of high performance?
And last but not least…
“What makes a worker choose to engage? This has two components: 1) the willingness and ability to engage, driven by personality, experience, etc. 2) The conditions at work being such that the worker feels good there, good enough to want to ‘go the extra mile’, do her best, learn as much as possible fully invest her mind and heart in the job, and so on.”
Now this is interesting. I raise no issue with Component 1.
Component 2 requires that the worker feels good. Component 2 is a feeling state. What’s more, it occurs when the worker feels good, motivated, energetic, and enthusiastic. So…
The second required component for engagement is happiness at work.
Engagement may be an acting state, but it requires a feeling state. You can create the conditions for engagement, and you can give an employee all the resources they need to fully engage. But to actually encourage a worker to engage, you need to foster happiness at work.
“But I wonder if [happiness at work] can be ‘learned’ in a day training or even a weekend”
Absolutely not. Happiness at work is learned in a day. But it can be built through focused effort. Building happiness at work is not easy, but it is surprisingly practical. We have developed a suite of tools and workshops for building happiness at work. Our tools are grounded in psychological research, and we continued to develop new tools and to test the ones we have.
Happiness at work is a mindset which enables you to maximize your performance and achieve your potential. It is not built in a day, but it can be built. And the tools exist to build it.
Simon this conversation gets more and more interesting. Don’t worry at all about being “controversial”, I think that is the way that knowledge moves forward, don’t you? As long as people listen to each other, of course! And as I listen I begin to understand what you guys are all about and how it relates to engagement and other things. Please also refer to what I said yesterday to Jessica on my own blog, which is that I am not an apologist or evangelist for engagement, have teased people in the field quite a bit, and enjoy doing so (they respond in kind, all part of the fun). It has more than a few shortcomings….like most approaches do. There is more than one path to God and more than one path to an engaged…or happy… workforce!
OK let me go with your format of quoting me then commenting. Here is what you said:
“What we are interested in is the mindset that make employees feel motivated to excel at their jobs, gives them the energy and enthusiasm to perform at their best, and the resilience to overcome challenges.”
This is very important, and in the employee engagement (EE) field it is often overlooked. There is a sense among EE practitioners that as long as conditions are right at work, then people will engage, but this is not true. I have mentioned to you that personality is a big factor, and while I do see some people working on this, there aren’t enough. Personality is hard or impossible to change of course, so that has some extreme hiring implications. So I believe that we need more of what you are doing, to give people the skills they need to be happy at work, to engage, whatever we call it. My only question here is the age old one of nature vs. nurture: what % of a person’s ability to engage/be happy at work is nature and what % nurture. You muddy the waters a bit with your piece on DNA and seem to move the argument back to nature! But like you, I do think people can change, even when their DNA points them in one direction.
“Component 2 is a feeling state. It occurs when the worker feels good, motivated, energetic, and enthusiastic. Component 2 is none other than happiness at work! Engagement may be an acting state, but it requires a feeling state. You can create the conditions for engagement, and you can give an employee all the resources they need to fully engage. But unless that employee is happy at work, the employee may not choose to engage”.
I had said that when conditions are right at work, then people can make the choice to engage (“Component 2”). What I didn’t say there, because I was not attempting to discuss the full blown psychology of engagement, was that there is an intermediate step, and that is an emotional one, or “feeling state”. Cary and I did this is in our book though, where we explained that when the “psycho-social” conditions are right at work (everything from the physical environment to how your boss treats you and much much more), then people experience a sense of high morale (or “well being”) which then translates into the behaviors we now call engagement. So now you can see the feeling state more clearly in this model, the emotional connection. One of the most critical conditions we are talking about here, confirmed by much research, is the boss-worker relationship. This has been tagged at explaining more than 80% of the variance in the engagement level of workers, an amazing number. So the emotional connection we feel is in relationship, not just to the job itself but to the people we are with day in and day out and how we are treated by them.
Now here is where we start to disagree: Component 2 is not just a feeling state, far from it! People react to the conditions at work with a feeling state, but the conditions at work are the crucial driver of that feeling state; those myriad conditions include the boss, but also all those pesky HR things like performance reviews (yuk!) and incentive pay programs, etc. Morale and EE practitioners and consultants like me are very involved in those conditions at work, sometimes referred to under the useful heading of corporate culture (“the way we do things”). With 80% plus of an individual’s engagement at work depending on that key boss-worker relationship, we had better see where the good and bad bosses are, and move actively to decrease the number of the latter and increase the former, and this we begin to do through the extraordinarily powerful methodology of surveys.
“And when someone works to build engagement, they’re really just working to build high performance. Which is great. But it implies that engagement isn’t a unique approach, it’s just another name for what people have been doing for years”.
Oh Simon methinks you have just been “hoist with your own petard” as our own Will Shakespeare said. I am not denying it for engagement, since I have made the same exact comments about it. In other words, engagement took the decades-long concept of morale, added some nice flavoring, microwaved it and served it up as fresh! But the same could be said for you guys: your definitions of happiness at work are essentially what people having been saying for a long time represent the engaged worker. The exact list which you cite for high performance is what you aim for, right? So you have taken high performance or engagement and re-packaged it as “happiness at work”. You are teaching people to be “engaged”…which as I said before is a great thing and very necessary. Look I am old enough and have been in this business long enough that there is not much new under the sun. This happens all the time. Engagement happens to be a word which excites people, they can use it easier than morale (she is “engaged” but not she is “moraled”), they can use it about customers, not just employees etc. Having said this I will say that I think engagement (like happiness at work, as you describe it) goes beyond performance because it has a strong positive emotional component. So I would disagree that engagement is simply performance, because for me, engagement means you are emotionally connected in a positive way and that is one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, you perform so above and beyond. As you would say, you are happy. As Jessica said on my blog yesterday, she knows CEOs who are “engaged” but are miserable. I would not really define them as engaged, I would say they perform, that’s all. The level of performance I am talking about simply isn’t possible when you have one foot out the door. OK maybe for a very short time, but this is a burn out situation which I have seen several times.
So, food for thought right? I returned your controversial (and somewhat correct!) statement with one of my own. But I like the tone of this conversation Simon, and appreciate it. This is also very useful for a writer and consultant like me, because it sharpens and clarifies the arguments for and against key things in my field.
Best to you,
David
http://www.moraleatwork.com
I have not hoisted myself with anyone’s petard, thank you very much
Yes, our goal is to increase the behaviors we list. But we do not claim they define happiness at work. Happiness at work is a mindset (or “feeling state”, if you will) which makes it possible to achieve and sustain high performance behaviors.
How is engagement an acting state if it contains a strong positive emotional component?