Imagine that you work for the most benevolent organization on earth — an organization that believes and practices fanatical employee support. They have anointed you with a big title, big office and big car. They clean your house, do your laundry and file your tax returns. There are piano lessons for your kids, personal trainers and home decorators, a pet photo contest every year, unlimited spa treatments, extended family cruises and ice cream socials. Not least, you completely adore your boss. In the history of the world, there has never been a more successful organization and you are exquisitely blessed to be right in the middle of it.
Now let me ask you a question: Are you engaged? Are you passionately connected and actively participating in the organization and the work you do? Do you bring your best game to work every day? Answer: According to research — even in these circumstances — you only have a 25 percent chance of being highly engaged.
The organization may lavish perks on you, but those perks don’t hold the key to your engagement. Feeding the pleasure center of the brain through extrinsic rewards doesn’t engage a person and bring real, lasting fulfillment. At best, it creates security and short-term pleasure, or hedonic well-being. This is a very different thing than true and sustained engagement.
Here’s a little history lesson. Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Hawthorne Effect.” Professor Elton Mayo did some studies in the 1920s to see what would happen if they changed working conditions at a Western Electric factory outside of Chicago. They turned the lights up in the factory and worker productivity went up. The employees were more satisfied. At least that’s what a lot of people thought. So for the next several decades, we focused on two concepts — working conditions and employee satisfaction. If we improve working conditions, employees will have higher job satisfaction, and higher job satisfaction will lead to higher productivity — so went the thinking.
The thinking was off. We discovered that employees can be satisfied and unproductive at the same time. In other words, it’s possible to be content and apathetic — to be “happy dead weight.”
What’s absolutely clear is that highly engaged employees own their own engagement. They are the driving force. With almost no exception, highly engaged employees believe that the burden of employee engagement falls on their shoulders, not the organization’s. It’s not about turning the lights up or providing a host of extrinsic rewards.
In most cases, the single biggest obstacle to employee engagement is the employee. Employees get in their own way by not taking charge of their professional lives. Ultimately, it may not matter what we want the answer to be to our question about who owns engagement. A globalizing world is giving us the answer whether we like it or not. Tory Johnson of ABC News puts it this way, “If we learned one thing from the job market last year, it's that nobody's coming to take care of our careers. We can't wait for a big bailout, a massive economic turnaround or some miracle to grow our paychecks. We're each responsible for taking charge and making things happen for ourselves.”
As an employee, you have three choices: 1. Accept what you have been given. 2. Change what you have been given. 3. Leave what you have been given. If you feel underused and undervalued, you have the opportunity to do something about it. You may be tempted to hold the organization accountable for your engagement, but nobody can give you passion. Nobody can instill in you deep and rich and vibrant engagement. Only you can do that. Only you should do that. Show me a disengaged person and I will show you lackluster performance, limited personal growth and diminished rewards. Show me an engaged person, and it’s just the opposite — high performance, accelerated personal growth and inevitable success.
I certainly acknowledge the very real constraints that exist in the current economy. The opportunities are more limited. Sometimes we have to bide our time before something opens up. We may even have to endure a period of unemployment. I have several friends out of work at the moment and it’s devastating to a person’s confidence. But in the end, and through it all, we must come back to the principle that we must own our own engagement.
Timothy R. Clark is the founder of TRClark Partners, a training and consulting organization. He earned a doctorate from Oxford University and is the best-selling author of "Epic Change" and "The Leadership Test." Email: trclark@trclarkpartners.com.