Fake Engagement

by Duncan Mathison

Have you ever taken an employee survey where you are asked to respond to items like this?

“I have the opportunity to do my best each day.”
“I would recommend the company as a good place to work to my friends.”
“Even though I work as hard as a dog, have no personal life and have not seen a raise in two years, I still love to come to work each day with a smile on my face.”

These survey items and others like them (OK, I made the last one up to make a point) are designed to measure something called Employee Engagement.  Typically on a scale of 1-5 the respondent is asked the degree to which they agree with the statement.

Employee Engagement is touted by any number of consulting firms as the Holy Grail to increased employee productivity. If employees are “engaged” they argue, customers are happier, profitability goes up and shareholder value improves (along with executive bonuses).  Engagement has even been linked to lower employee theft and lower heath care costs.

So when your employer starts sending around surveys on employee engagement you can bet that management is trying to figure out a way to improve any number of these metrics without improving costs. This is often bad news for middle managers because most research suggests that how employees feel about their direct manager usually is related to how engaged they feel about the company overall.

So of course what happens is that the survey results become part of your manager’s performance review plan. Mangers are quick to understand.  Have happy and engaged employees…or else.  

I have always been a little suspect of these correlations between employee engagement and company performance. Do happy employees improve profitability or does profitability make for happy employees?

When the financials are good, executives are happy, generous and usually leave you alone to do your job. This makes for a happy job. On the other hand, when the financials are bad, executives get unhappy, become Scrooge-like and meddle in the details of your work.  This makes for an unhappy job.  

But if you say you are unhappy and unengaged as a result company decisions and corporate micromanagement, it will still be your manager’s problem.  If employee engagement on their team is down, the manager is blamed – not the senior executives and their decisions.

This means that managers prefer employees who appear engaged to those who appear less engaged. From a career management perspective, this is important when decisions are being made as to who gets hired and, when there is a downsizing, who is let go.

So if you are unhappy and are at risk of being un-engaged should you fake happiness and engagement? You bet you should.

I once picked up a wise and clever little business book titled, “Beware of Those Who Ask for Feedback: And Other Organizational Constants” by Richard Moran.  The title said it all. Career smart people never show they are unhappy and unengaged in their work. They do not show it in their job interviews and they do not show it in their day-to-day interactions with their manager.

The problem of course, if you are like many people (including me), it is really hard to fake happiness while unhappy about a job or, during an interview, about unhappy jobs in the past. Manager’s need happy or more to the point, engaged employees – whether or not it is deserved.

So from a career perspective, the next time you are asked if you like(d) your job –  put on a happy face.

Tags: ace the interview, career advice, crazy boss, Duncan Mathison, interviewing, job search advice, lay offs, positive psychology

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Blog, Uncategorized, interviewing, job search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.