The Measurement and Management of Employee Engagement

 

This is the second in a series of posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In the first post on March 24th, I reviewed the findings in Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book, It’s the Manager: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they accounted for an astounding 70% of this  success. No other factor even came close.

Firming Up Gallup’s Findings

The basic insights, fundamental principles, and methods of employee engagement are not new. Today, we can firm up one thing about the new model of management of employee engagement: The research confirming it, foremost Gallup’s findings chronicled in Clifton and Harter’s book, from different perspectives is extensive and sound. For example, many years ago, throughout many of his writings on management, Peter Drucker emphasized the imperative of managing an organization’s human resources. The most important task of a manager, he wrote, is to make the strengths of employees productive and their weaknesses irrelevant. He implied the competencies of an engaging manager when he recommends that the next time you hire someone to manage, ask yourself whether you would want your son or daughter to work for him or her.

Motivational Interviewing (MI), highlighted in the organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s 2021 book, Think Again, is an approach to treating people with addictions developed by clinical psychologist William R. Miller in the early 1980s. Much like the role of the engaged manager in successful employee engagement, MI is based on an attitude of humility and curiosity on the part of the therapist. It involves three key techniques that are also fundamental to employee engagement: asking open-ended questions, engaging in reflecting listening, and affirming the person’s desire and ability to change. And like Gallup’s Jim Clifton’s and Jim Harter’s Miller’s recognition that employee engagement is not just a management technique but a new model of management, Miller  and his collaborators discovered that MI was not just a new approach to treatment, it was an entirely different way of helping people change.

Under the heading of “I Err, Therefore I Learn, Grant explores research on psychological safety, which has flourished in recent years. Psychological safety is not a matter of relaxing standards, being nice and agreeable, or giving unconditional praise, he writes, but rather it means “fostering a climate of respect, trust, and openness in which people can raise concerns and suggestions with fear of reprisal.” This is the foundation of a learning culture fundamental to employee engagement.

Finally, a recent paper by the Centre for Business Research at Cambridge University reviewed by Bartleby in the April 3^rd-9^th 2021 issue of The Economist, used the opportunity of the pandemic to study people’s relationship with work, specifically the impact of reduced work hours on well-being during the pandemic when many British furloughed employees had their hours reduced while their wages were subsidized by the government. What was surprising was how few hours – a threshold of only one day a week -- were required for good mental health. Reprising the theory and principles of employee engagement, the “boost from working clearly comes from the feeling of meaning and  purpose, from the social status it creates and from the camaraderie of colleagues engaged in the same tasks,” writes Bartelby.

The Measurement and Management of Employee Engagement

What sets Gallup’s groundbreaking work on employee engagement apart is its empirical foundations that not only supports its claims to credibility but also provides very detailed methodology for making employee engagement work in practice from a step-by-step instructions for measuring it to providing as a sample cover letter accompanying the survey instrument.

The central metric of employee engagement was introduced to international court administration as Measure 9, Employee Engagement, one of  eleven core measures of the Global Measures of Court Performance, which is an integral part of the International Framework for Court Excellence of the International Consortium for Court Excellence. Part 1 of the Global Measures is a primer of the discipline of court performance measurement and management (PMM). It describes underlying values, principles, and concepts, as well as challenges and risks of PMM, e.g., overcoming the resistance to PMM that may be inherent in our nature. Commentary acknowledges that performance measures are instruments of power and control and encourages judiciaries and courts, as the legitimate authorities for assessing their performance, to take ownership of PMM.

Part 2, including Measure 9, is prescriptive, describing eleven specific core measures in terms of precise operational definitions and instructions that render the measures actionable and SMART — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. The appeal of Measure 9 lies in its power, simplicity and utility. It is intuitively appealing, easy to understand, and produces actionable data with relatively modest investments of time and effort. It highlights the importance of a court’s or court system’s workforce and encourages leaders, managers, supervisors, and staff to find ways to energize and engage them. The organization and administration of the survey are relatively straightforward and can be accomplished by most courts without employment of an outside consultant with expertise in survey administration (by using  a free online survey instrument such as SurveyMonkey).

Selected Items from the Court Employee Engagement Survey

§      I am able to do my best everyday (Item 4) §        Someone at work cares about me as a person (Item 7) §       I am encouraged to try new ways of doing things (Item 11) §       I feel free to speak my mind (Item 15) §       I am treated with respect (Item 19)

 Designed to be completed in approximately ten minutes, Measure 9 employs a survey – a 20-item self-administered anonymous questionnaire — of the strength of the court's workforce and the quality of the relationships of its employees and their managers. Each court employee during the survey timeframe (e.g., a week) is sent an e-mail with a link to a secure and anonymous online site where the electronic survey is completed. In courts and court system with limited internet connectivity or email capacity, the survey can be administered by pen and paper. The questionnaire asks respondents to rate their agreement with each of 20 simple statements on a five-point scale from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.” In addition to the 20 substantive items, respondents are asked to identify the organizational divisions, unit or current work location, and demographic information about themselves like gender, race and/or national origin, length of court service, position grade level (e.g., management or line staff position), and experience.

In addition to central tendencies in aggregate data (e.g., the percent of employees who agree or strongly agree with all 20 statements, these data break-outs allow analysts to dive deeper into your employees’ response by breaking out data into more specific categories. This is where the unique power of the metric comes into play. Breakouts or disaggregation of the data by court unit or division, or by court location, have the potential of yielding insights and practical guidance for establishing baseline performance levels, setting goals and objectives, identifying trends and patterns, discovering “bright spots” that exceed norms (e.g., a unit or division of the court that stands out with exemplary responses to the survey or particular items), analyzing problems, seeing patterns and trends, discovering solutions, planning, and formulating strategy.

Identifying Bright Spots and Trouble Spots

The following is a lightly edited description of Measure 9, Employee Engagement, in the Global Measures under the heading “Notes on Effective Use.”

The power of Measure 9 is that it is intuitively appealing, easy to understand, and produces actionable data. It highlights the importance of a court’s or court system’s workforce and encourages leaders, managers, supervisors and staff to find ways to energize and engage. It readily reveals “trouble spots” as well as “bright spots,” and is easily translated into improvement actions.

By tracking the results of the survey over time, court managers can ascertain trends or changes associated with improvement initiatives. The measure is actionable and its effective use is easily revealed both at the (a) most aggregated level of data (averaged across all court locations, divisions, and units of a court or court system, and across all 20 items of the questionnaire) likely to be the focus of the top management of a court or court system, as well as at (b) the most disaggregated level (broken down to the percent of agreement for one item among the 20 items of the questionnaire in a particular unit of a court), likely the focus of line managers and supervisors at the unit level of a court.

What is the minimally acceptable level of employee engagement across a court or court system as a whole? Across all 20 items? For each item? The initial measurement can provide a court system the data to answer these questions and establish baselines against which subsequent measurements can be compared. It can help establish priorities. Identifying the five items with the lowest percent of agreement, for example, may be a good practical starting point for improving organizational performance in the areas of most concern to employees. Discussion of these areas might lead to re-evaluating on-the-job training needs of new employees, providing employees better and more timely information about performance expectations and feedback, improving the flow of communication, and creating an environment where employees feel safe expressing opinions and sharing new ideas. When the measure is assessed at the level of a court department, division, unit, as well as different locations of a court or court system (e.g., main and satellite courthouses or separate juvenile courts) managers can learn a lot about organizational performance. Simply by identifying other divisions or situations with superior results, (i.e., the “bright spots”), astute managers may be close to identifying possible solutions for “trouble spots.” Different courts (of the same level) or different divisions of a single court might be compared, for example, on the percent of employees who agreed that they understand what is expected of them (Item 1) and are proud to be working in the court (Item 20). Follow-up queries can then be made to probe the comparisons. Why are some locations more successful than others? What makes them the “bright spots”? What are they doing that the other locations are not? Asking staff in both the most successful and least successful locations these simple questions can help to identify “evidenced based” good practices.

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