Have You Ever Thought About Employee Engagement from a Psychotherapist Perspective?

Psychotherapist, serving as an organizational consultant for Fortune 500 companies around the world and New York Times bestselling author Esther Perel emphasizes very important key points that I think most organizations, HR departments do not take into account when talking about engagement.*

When you think about your life so far, what is constant in your life? The city you live in? Your friends? Your partner?

What would your parents’ or grandparents’ answer be if you have asked these questions to them? They probably worked at the same workplace until they got retired. They probably got married once without having relationship with any other people.

Stability was the norm in their period; it made them hard to leave (cities, jobs, marriages...). However change is constant in our time. And it affects all our life.

If we talk about employee engagement, it means different considering stability or changeability in the time we live.

Putting another perspective, our grandparents lived in production economy; our parents in service economy and now we are living in identity economy.* What does it mean?

“Our jobs and relationships are place for identity and fulfillment. We want a person in our lives that will make best version ourselves. That’s identity model for relationships. The same thing is also at work. We want a job that cares for our emotional and physical wellbeing, flexibility so that it can adapt to our situation, help our professional and personal growth.”*

Putting these information all together, we can say that many people will probably have more than one job and more than one career.*

So the question we need to ask is more than “how do we increase employee engagement scores?”. It is about “how can we provide a great employee experience so that people recommend our company as a great place to work?” or “How can we adapt our companies to this identity model?” or “How can we support our employees in building their second career?” or “How can we make them want to work here again after they work at some other companies?” They will change jobs, careers even if we provide a great employee experience and career opportunities within the company or not.

So, why do we continue to ask the very same engagement questions that we asked 10 years ago? Why do we try to measure engagement in old ways?

Most of the companies consider employee engagement scores as a performance indicator or as the most important topic to focus on. Considering the shift in our lives, we need to change our approach on employee engagement.

In June 2023, Gallup launched “State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report”. In this report, there are some “good news” and some very bad news.

Good news is that, the percentage of employees thriving at work reached a record high in 2022. Twenty-three percent of the world’s employees were engaged at work in 2022, the highest level since Gallup began measuring global engagement in 2009.**

Bad news is that, globally, over half of employees expressed some level of intent to leave their job. So this second insight shows that even if employee engagement scores are high, it doesn't mean that employees are totally engaged.

Engagement is not a characteristic of employees; employees’ approach to work can’t be understood with just existing HR perspective. We need a mindset shift to really understand employees and what we can do for them.

So, which point of view, strategy or approach do you think you need to change in your company?

*Esther Perel / How’s Work? The Prologue: What couples therapy teaches us about work?

** Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report, June 2023

June 20, 2023