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Hey Reader 👋🏻

Employee Happiness ≠ Employee Engagement.

Engagement is misunderstood as it relates to employees. Often the prominent belief is that happy employees are engaged employees. This idea leads to window dressing and surface level initiatives aimed at creating "happy" employees through a steady drip of dopamine hits.

Of course, there's nothing wrong at all with shooting to make employees happy - if you have the culture and budget that supports it, the more "happy initiatives" the merrier (literally)!
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But, don't be fooled into thinking that making employees happy, will automatically translate to engagement and performance. That's not how engagement in the true sense really works.
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If we want to understand engagement properly as it relates to retention and performance, we can look at Customer Engagement in a product sense. We can learn a lot from the CX and UX practices to understand what true Customer Engagement looks like and how to design for it.

Definitions of Engagement

In digging around for definitions of customer engagement, I came across this one which is perfect for our application in PX:

💡Customer Engagement: the intentional process of building and nurturing a relationship with customers through meaningful, value-driven interactions across various touchpoints, aiming to foster loyalty, trust, and long-term brand advocacy, extending beyond mere transactions.
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We can swap “customers” + “brand” with “employees” + "employee" respectively and BOOM 💥 we have a much more clear and relevant definition of employee engagement to work from:
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💡Employee Engagement: the intentional process of building and nurturing a relationship with employees through meaningful, value-driven interactions across various touchpoints, aiming to foster loyalty, trust, and long-term employee advocacy, extending beyond mere transactions.
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The biggest problem with aiming for “Happy” is that it isn’t a realistic goal.
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We just aren’t happy every day.
Happy extends beyond the parameters of our work.
Being at work doesn’t always make us happy.
Critical but painful conversations don’t make us happy.
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There are MANY aspects of work which do not equate to happiness. Instead, we can learn from the 3 main aspects of our customer engagement definition to:
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→ Build and nurture relationships with employees
→ Create meaningful, value-driven interactions across various touchpoints
→ Foster loyalty & trust, leading to long-term advocacy
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This is a much better model for driving employee engagement, than the flawed idea that: Happy Employees = Productive Employees.
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The thing with real employee engagement is that it is built over time, with intention, with integrity, with authenticity - which is difficult. To build trust you have to be honest. In order to be honest your have to risk making people unhappy.

No solid relationship, be it personal or work, is built on happiness alone. You will know this from your personal experience. The person you trust most (likely a spouse - certainly is in my case) is the person who is the most honest with you, because they want the best for you, which sometimes means hard truths and difficult conversations.

During her session at Immersive PX | Amsterdam, Ingeborg said; "Nice is telling people what they want to hear today. Kind is telling them what they need to hear tomorrow". Nice = Happy. Kind = Care. I like this a lot as a mantra for building meaningful relationships in all domains of life and it applies to employee engagement too.

Instead of aiming for happiness as a measure of engagement, what you really want to be able to demonstrate and track are:

→ Trust (I believe in the leadership and they want what's best for me)
→ Transparency (I feel "in the know", there are no secrets here)
→ Clarity (I know what is expected of me and of those around me)
→ Connection (to the mission, my role, the leaders, and the people)​
​→ Growth (I feel I am becoming more by being here)
→ Value (I feel like I get a lot of benefit for what I give in exchange)
→ and yes, Delight! (I have moments of joy and I like it here!)

Intentional design oriented around achieving these outcomes is what will lead to true engagement. And that engagement is what will lead to productivity, performance, retention and advocacy.
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Of course, this is much more difficult than simply making people happy with perks disguised as value. But the effort will return exponentially and the data backs it up too. 87% of business leaders said CX is their top growth driver in a Deloitte study I read in researching for this newsletter. If that's true of brand, we can assume it to be true in PX too.
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If you are a Head of People tasked with improving employee engagement, think long term value-creation, not short term dopamine hits. Most companies are scrambling to attract and retain top tier talent. I would suggest the best strategy for retention and growth in a People sense is to Lean into CX and UX practices and double down on the customer experience of your "work product".

For me, this is the (not so) secret of creating highly engaged and high performing employees, teams and businesses.

OK, that’s a wrap for this week.

Grab your coffee and open up your inbox same time next week for more insights, tips, and resource flags on how to smash HR silos, add strategic value and turn your People function into a growth driver 🚀

With love,

Luke ✌🏻

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