What Happened to Employee Engagement in 2011?

Employee engagement, you know that catch-all buzzword that speaks to how well employees are feeling these days?  Well it seems like it wasn’t all that rosy in employee land last year.   

AonHewitt, the consultancy that specializes in HR services along with a raft of other fun stuff like health and benefits, compensation, talent and organization, mergers and acquisitions, investing etc. has released data from their 2011Employee Engagement Database showing that engagement is still lagging.  Given the state of the economy and the fact that we have a very dysfunctional government running things, I’m kind of surprised that employees aren’t tearing their hair out by the roots.  Disengagement might be the least of our worries. 

But nonetheless, the 5700 employee database which represents over five million employees worldwide, reveals …

“an engagement level of 56 percent for the end of 2011, which is the same as 2010, but lower than 2009 (60 percent) and 2008 (57 percent). Traditionally, engagement levels between 65 percent and 100 percent represent a high-performing culture; 45 percent to 65 percent indicate the workforce is indifferent to organizational success or failure; and anything lower than 45 percent represents a serious or destructive range.” 

It seems that the largest drop in engagement comes from employees’ perceptions of how companies manage performance.  Or in other words, employees think their bosses have not provided the proper level of management that leads to better productivity.  They also don’t do a very good job of connecting the employees performance overall to company goals.

Sounds reasonable to us, not being in the corporate world anymore we really wouldn’t know that businesses out there don’t do a very good job of connecting performance to goals.  Frankly, that sounds like a communication problem to us.  

The report goes on to state that significant numbers of employees are not motivated to work beyond job requirements and are thinking of leaving in the near future.  Not sure what “significant” means, maybe over 50%, but the way that the majority of employees have been treated in this bad economy, I’m surprised it wasn’t higher. 

When discussing what drives this engagement, they point to many things but as always “appropriate recognition beyond pay and benefits for employee contribution” is high on the list.  Recognition has been on this list for years.  When will the guru executives every really understand and practice it?  It’s surely the easiest fix of anything else they can do.