Understanding What Really Matters to Your Employees

The Covid pandemic and its associated disruption have been a good reminder of the importance of having employees who are engaged. Of course, many organizations were already well aware of the value of this and work hard at creating an environment that supports engagement, illustrated by the vast sums spent on staff engagement activities.

$1 billion was spent in the US alone in 2017 on engagement activities 

A major part of staff engagement activities is its measurement, with most efforts directed towards measuring this at the individual level (Attridge, 2009). Here there are a plethora of surveys where employees are asked to score themselves and their colleagues against a series of questions, which are then amalgamated into an overall rating for the organization. Some of the leading approaches include The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), the Gallup Q12, and various ‘people analytic’ surveys designed in-house, such as those used by Google as part of its project 'Oxygen'. These quantitative approaches of measurement have become the go-to method for many organizations in their desire to understand employee engagement, they have become ubiquitous.

Of course, employee engagement is a vital aspect of building a successful organization, however, the focus on engagement may lead to other potentially more significant issues being hidden or completely missed. For example, it may fail to pick up on the impact of relationship dynamics in an organization, the interactions with customers, the efficacy of health and safety measures, the level of isolation employees experience, the experience of failure or success, etc. The response to this criticism is typically to suggest an even more granular approach to measuring engagement. Fortunately, there are alternatives to this, other ways to gauge how people are feeling and importantly experiencing working in an organization.

Here I want to make the distinction between how employees feel and how they experience their work. Unquestionably, how people feel at work is an important issue and influences strongly their behavior. Understanding their experience at work is a much broader concept, capturing not just the things people like or do not like about their work, but all the activities, interactions, relationships, and happenings that take place and are important to them. Engagement surveys often focus on the feeling aspect of employment, seeking to understand how employees feel about their work, their colleagues, their manager, and the overall culture. Investigating how employees experience working provides a far richer source of data for understanding what is going on. It is a paradigm shift away from measuring engagement to the understanding of the lived experience of the employee. It is an approach for us much better based on phenomenology.

 What is the experience of work for people in your organization?

Phenomenology was developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl, aimed at making how we experience our world the center of inquiry. It is an approach to understanding the human condition by revealing and highlighting the phenomena that make up our lives, something Merleau-Ponty explains as trying “to give a direct description of our experience as it is” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). It does not seek to measure or quantify that experience, but instead, it employs a qualitative method concerned with the “naturalistic or interpretation of phenomena in terms of the meaning these have for people experiencing them” (Langdridge, 2007).

The application of a phenomenological approach to understanding what really matters to employees starts with interviews of a representative sample of them. Doing this right takes skill and competence, and unlike some of the qualitative interview approaches used to gauge engagement, it is not as straightforward as simply asking a set of questions. It is instead a much more nuanced approach, one that encourages the interviewee to talk about their experiences in a free and open manner. When done correctly it provides a rich set of data that can then be phenomenologically analyzed to provide a clear picture of how employees experience working in an organization and what actually matters to them there. It is an approach that provides insights that are much deeper and more comprehensive than the typical engagement survey route.

 A phenomenological approach can provide a rich source of insight.

Given the benefits of this approach, one should ask why phenomenological methods are not applied more often? Firstly, there are few organizational development consultants that are familiar with or have any skill in phenomenology. Phenomenologically trained consultants are a rarity. Secondly, most business leaders are unaware of the phenomenological approach to understanding the experience of working in an organization and the benefits it can bring. It is an approach to organizational insights that is little known and which few can support.

 Phenomenologically trained consultants are a rarity

To conclude, there is a lot of value still to be had in simply measuring employee engagement and for many organizations, this may be sufficient. However, for those organizations looking to really understand what matters to their employees, they require a much better approach and a phenomenology can provide this. So, if you are interested in learning more about the value phenomenology can bring your organization then reach out to us for a coffee and a chat.