Why employee engagement is only part of the employee experience

Employee engagement measures the relationship between employee and organisation. It attempts to measure the enthusiasm and motivation to further the best interests of the organisation.

To us, employee engagement exists at the intersection between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation at work. Some view this as a proxy for productivity, while others may confuse the term with employee experience. So, today Think Beyond discuss why employee engagement is only part of the employee experience.

Measuring employee engagement

In general, an organisation with high employee engagement may be expected to outperform an organisation with low employee engagement. Alas, the same can be said for individuals, with high employee engagement implying ‘bought in’ and productive. Typically, employee engagement is measured via survey. The questions range from asking about how plans are communicated to how successfully groups collaborate. If the overall index is high, management look for ‘hot spots’ of problems. Where the index is low in a particular team or department, the problem may be the manager.

Unfortunately, such a survey is potentially vulnerable to a whole range of weaknesses. These might include the context of the individual at the time they complete the survey to the way the questions are worded. Similarly, not all employees believe that such a survey is anonymous. This can give rise to misleading responses, hiding the real issues and rising the potential to jump to conclusions or to sow suspicion as to the motivations behind the survey.

Employee experience is broader than employee engagement

To some, this point is blindingly obvious.

To others, it may come as a surprise. Your employee experience is much broader than employee engagement. Engagement is the result of a person’s intrinsic motivations mated to their extrinsic influences. In truth, most managers and organisations fail to understand the intrinsic motivators of their people. They simply do not spend the time delving deep enough to uncover what makes them ‘tick’. That leaves the extrinsic influences that may or may not motivate them to perform and strive to further your interests.

Building an engaging employee experience

Employee experience is both contextual and the result of an elaborate mix of extrinsic influences. The trouble is that you don’t know which ones are pulling in a negative direction and which are positive. Some may cost nothing to fix whereas others may require sizeable upheaval to achieve. Thanks to breakthroughs in neuroscience, such perceptions, associations and emotions can be measured through studies to help us understand the extrinsic motivators. Maybe the problem is the manager. Maybe it is the job tasks. Perhaps a slow system, a lack of training, flexi-desking, claiming expenses or the culture itself that drives low engagement. Either way, we need to measure the real root causes if we truly want to improve it.

With a combination of anonymous surveys, blind interviews and neuroscience studies online, we can start building an experience that encourages engaged employees so let us help you put employee experience improvement as one of your strategic goals.