2. We Need To Understand What Drives Disengagement

Typical employee engagement surveys give us some kind of indication of employment engagement or disengagement, and allow us to put a number on this by way of a benchmark, but they don’t tell us WHY employees are engaged or disengaged, or what we can do to improve things.

The ‘engagement profile’ that emerges at the end of these surveys (e.g. ‘Engagement Profile: 71%’) is only a relative measure: it tells us if we are doing better than last year, or better than another company or internal division. It does not give us a meaningful profile of the various things – some major, some minor – that are causing engagement and disengagement.

To understand that people’s responses to organisational behaviours, and to be able to take effective action to make things better, we need to dig deeper. We need to analyse the complexities of organisational behaviour: the various behaviours, sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, that, taken together, create every organisation’s unique culture.

Because all organisational cultures are different, it is impossible to generalise about what engages or disengages employees across different cultures. Employees who are highly engaged in one corporate culture might find a different culture disengaging, and vice versa.

The Human Energy Organisation has broken down organisational behaviour into 10 ‘dimensions’ which we believe encapsulate all significant aspects of organisational behaviour – things like ‘Control’, ‘Measurement’, ‘Leadership’ and ‘Communication’. These are easily recognisable and understandable. We all know what they mean and what it would look like if these things were working well or badly. You may have your own dimensions to add to the list, but we believe that our 10 dimensions cover pretty much all of the bases.

Read the third part of our argument: Organisational Cultures Must Be Analysed In Detail

What We Believe