The power of people energy drives employee engagement.
If you were to research companies you’d find a lot of evidence about how well they perform as an organisation through things like NASDAQ/FTSE; shareholder reports; P&L statements; employee engagement stats and Glassdoor reviews.
They ALL fail to really demonstrate just what power there is in driven people who are aligned to the company purpose and passionate about their craft being kind to the planet, doing good for their society and serving customers brilliantly.
There’s a big big problem with employee engagement. It is a metric based output built on analysis of responses to survey questions as a best attempt to assess the “attachment” people have to their employer. It’s a measure of a survey exercise and it isn’t a deeply powerful and reliable take on how much people give to the thing they call work.
Up until the time I broke my own job, let people down, committed corporate misdemeanours and walked away from a successful career I reported as engaged on a survey. That’s only one reason why they’re flawed. They cannot, do not and probably will never predict or sense this kind of thing.
My focus though is on another angle.
It’s on the physical effort people put into their work. And I don’t just mean their outputs – their customer calls they’ve handled or the sales they’ve made or the widgets they’ve created.
I’m talking about their social skills, their imagination and ingenuity, their application when the heat is on, their problem solving, their shortcuts to better processes, their brand advocacy, their referrals of great people in their network, their commitment to learning and more.
Essentially we have no engagement > kilojoules > purpose maximising index.
If we could measure people’s kilojoules per hour in a toxic controlling environment versus a freedom-centred inclusive one we might just move the dial on how we domesticate or liberate our people. And then overlay that with creativity quotient and kindness per hour and we might have some measures worth considering in light of engagement.
So my dream that in the future investors, shareholders and consumers don’t just focus on P&L and brand reputation but will only buy into or from a company based on its PPI – People Powered Index.
In order to move the engagement dial from a response only to pre-formulated questions, we need to capture a different series of data streams.
Where people and the work they do creates leaves the same kinds of data footprints we see on Amazon, Facebook, Trip Advisor, Google searches, Instagram likes and more. These – using Artificial Intelligence and analysis of the data you can see more of the trends of where people are expending effort.
We don’t need surveys that share stuff that’s not reflective of how people are spending their time and gives us a series of outbursts or can’t really be arsed answers.
Let’s get data that actually tells us what people are engaged in, measure the impact of the the kilojoules they expend, the kindness they give willingly to colleagues and customers and the true state of their contributions.
THAT will show engaged they are in what they do, how they do it and the true value people are bringing to an organisation.
A People Powered Index.
