The Engagement Gap: why executives and employees think differently about employee engagement

Employee engagement means something different to executives and employees. Ask any employee if they feel "engaged" and most will tell you "not really." Ask executives about the effectiveness of employee engagement programs, and you'll most likely hear, "we're doing great!" This disconnect hidden in plain sight creates what I call the Engagement Gap and it is leading to millions lost in productivity and also the loss of great talent. For example, according to Gallup, actively disengaged employees cost companies $450-to-$550 billion in lost productivity each year.

The gap between executives and employees regarding engagement is a critical and rising issue in the workplace. For many reasons, stakeholders underestimate the importance of, or misunderstands the practice of, employee engagement and what’s needed to cultivate a productive and even desirable culture.

Over the last several months, I worked with Jostle Corporation to understand the Engagement Gap. We surveyed employees and executives separately in order to expose these gaps between their views of employee engagement and communications. You can download the report here (no email gate).

To identify and close the Engagement Gap, executives must acknowledge the problem. And, they must invest time, energy, and even budget to solve it, aggressively, every day.

The Fault In Our Stars

Interestingly, 99% of executives believe that their employees have a major impact on the company’s success. At the same time, they believe that current employee engagement programs are contributing to that success. On average, executives ranked the priority of employee engagement at 8.3 out of 10.

However, data from our survey suggests that while they believe in employee engagement, they aren’t doing a great job of, you know, actually engaging employees. On average, employees rated their own engagement at a “meh” value of 5.5 out of 10.

The Importance of Purpose and Impact

The future of work is a focus on purpose. Without purpose there’s no foundation for employee engagement. In our survey, we asked employees to rate their own level of engagement in the workplace. We found a very strong correlation between feeling that their work matters and their level of engagement. Linking engagement to purpose brings executives and employees together around a common cause or good. Most notably, those employees who do not believe that their work matters to the company have the lowest engagement figures, less than 3 out of 10. That’s a very toxic number.

Employee engagement programs should focus on helping employees believe their work matters. Helping employees understand how their work fits into the big picture and how things are going will have a greater impact on their level of engagement.

True employee engagement is defined by many factors that tend to get overlooked in favor of platforms, channels, and technology.

Making Corporate Culture Matter

Raising employee engagement has become one of the highest priorities for organizations all around the globe, according to a 2015 Conference Board CEO study.

Rebecca Ray PhD, Executive Vice President for Human Capital and Engagement Research at the Conference Board who led the study, found that employee engagement must be intentional and earned. As, she so profoundly said a FactCompany article by Mark C Rowley...

“The culture you create or the culture you destroy will determine the success of your business.” 

When it’s left to chance, your culture is simply what it is.

In our research, we found that a little more than half of employees are neutral on their company culture. But more than a quarter felt it was dysfunctional. Unsurprisingly, executives are slightly more optimistic here as elsewhere. These numbers are balanced, however, by those who feel it is positive and vibrant. You won’t be surprised that we also found a strong positive correlation between a positive view of culture and engagement.

Engagement: New Perspective and Tools are Needed

In this important study with Jostle, I aimed to introduce you to the Engagement Gap, and give you an accelerated path to closing it.  It exists everywhere, even in your company. That's why the report is free to download.

Even though companies use communications channels and programs, it doesn’t mean they work or are as effective as employees need them to be. It’s time to change that. It’s time to discover your Engagement Gap and reinvent the tools and programs that put the engagement into your employee engagement program.

It’s not that companies don’t get the importance of it, it’s that they don’t yet see it as a problem and as a result are focusing on the wrong things. We just need to first recognize the problem and then prioritize our efforts to have a mission that matters, and that people can see how their work impacts that mission.

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