A colleague and I were chatting about her company’s engagement efforts.  ”We pay a lot of attention to engagement,” she said.  ”For instance, just now we had another engagement survey.  We believe that happy employees serve our customers better and thus yield better results for our company.”

A fine thought… but unfortunately not quite accurate.  In reality, engagement and satisfaction are not synonymous terms. Engagement means a complete connection with one’s work, a connection expressed cognitively, physically, and emotionally.  Engaged employees are not only satisfied… they are also proud of what they do, attentive, focused, and energetic.  This combination of pride, attention, and energy is powerful - and yields extraordinary results.

Satisfaction, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean productivity.  For instance, an employee could be satisfied with the general work conditions and even complimentary of her supervisor and colleagues - and yet be disengaged. In fact, attempts to find positive correlations between satisfaction and productivity have often found mixed results.  

Because satisfaction and engagement are not synonymous, we advise our clients to pay special attention to the engagement surveys they select.  The majority of the surveys currently in the market tend to measure antecedents of engagement such as good work relations, a pleasant environment, or inclusive leadership. While those factors are likely to be, indeed, connected to engagement, they are not the same as engagement.  

The ideal survey should, therefore, ask questions directly related to engagement. Antecedent questions on environmental, leadership, job, and other aspects may be included, as long as true engagement items (i.e. how proud are you of your work? how much attention to you pay to your job?) are also measured. 

Of course, there is a problem with this approach as well - social desirability bias.  People know they are “supposed” to feel pride. They know they are paid to pay attention.  Won’t these beliefs and suppositions lead to less than honest responses?

Possibly - which is what makes the design of an engagement study so tricky.  The “optimum” study will probably include qualitative and quantitative data collection methods such as written surveys, interviews, and focus group discussions.  Triangulation - asking the same question to different observers - is also helpful.  Also, a good study will measure employees at different times instead of once only.  Engagement, after all, is a variable construct - even people who are engaged most of the time are not permanently engaged.  

Of course a mixed methods study such as the one described is neither easy nor inexpensive - thus, understandably, few if any organizations or researchers go that far.  I am now in the middle of my dissertation study on engagement and am collecting my data via a quantitative survey distributed once to employees. That is fine - as long as results are put into perspective and limitations of the findings are acknowledged.  Each of us contributes one more piece to the engagement puzzle.  Each survey gives us a sense of where we are.  After all, there is no such thing as certainty in the world of social research.