Jonathan D. Villaire - The Stepford Employee Fallacy: The Truth About Employee Engagement in the Modern Workplace

Dedication

For every employee who has ever felt that he or she had no voice. This is the truth your leaders sorely need to hear. This is the truth about employee engagement in the modern workplace.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my family and friends for their love and unending support. I would also like to thank those who contributed their stories to this book and entrusted me with their truth. Finally, thank you to the leaders out there who believe in my message and who live it every day; we need you to keep up the good work now more than ever.

Authors Note

The modern workplace is not one where employees can safely tell the truth for reasons you will see in the coming pages. Names and certain details mentioned herein have been changed to protect the innocent. I have tried to recreate personal stories, including relevant events, locations, and conversations, based on my own recollection. Claims about the (mis)conduct of any organizations, business entities, and involved parties were obtained through the public domain via news reports, court filings, and other credible publications and sources. References to any copyrighted works have been made for the purpose of commentary and to support the themes and concepts discussed throughout this book.

Introduction

Leaders, how many of you out there have sat wringing your hands in frustration over less-than-stellar performance due to the poor state of engagement within your organizations? Wouldnt it be grand if your employees would just give 110 percent every day, their priorities aligned with yours at all times? Oh, how the shareholders would delight if only your employees would go above and beyond all day every day! The sales! The profits! The cost savings! And just imagine how much free time you would have if you didnt even have to lift a finger. The employees would just be constantly engaged because thats their job. Thats how employee engagement works, right?

Let me ask you something: are you familiar with the term Stepford wife? Its a pop-culture reference used to describe a married woman who appears docile and eager to please. A Stepford wife is seemingly perfect in every way and gladly submits to her husbands will. The reason she is so content to do his bidding is because she is literally a robot. She is programmed to think, act, and speak in a way that pleases her husband without any pesky needs, opinions, wants, or rights to make things difficult.

Many leaders today believe their employees are nothing more than a means to achieve company goals. Human capital is expected to be fully engaged and invested in executing organizational priorities because they are paid to do so. But the thing is, employees are people. They arent robots and they arent going to be engaged because you expect them to be. They wont be committed to going above and beyond for the company cause if the employee experience at their organization isnt a positive onea fact cast in stark relief by data showing that less than one-quarter of employees around the world are fully engaged in their jobs. Yet, the decision makers continue to labor under the delusion that their talent will exert discretionary effort while maintaining a positive attitude at all times regardless of what its like to work for them. This is a dangerous fallacy that needs to be exposed for what it is: pure fiction.

I wrote this book with the intention of expelling the commonly held beliefs about employee engagement that are costing companies billions of dollars each year in turnover, absenteeism, low productivity, reputational damage, higher taxes to cover unemployment, and other factors that eat away at the bottom line. For a decade, I worked as a front-line employee within large organizations that purported to place a high priority on employee engagement. However, there was a critical disconnect between what these companies expected from their employees in terms of engagement and what their leaders were doing to engage them. I saw employees being scapegoated, ignored, manipulated, and treated unfairly while senior management reminded them that they should be fully engaged and contributing to the companys success. Anyone who raised a concern or voiced dissatisfaction with the quality of their employee experience was labeled a complainer who had an attitude problem, a malfunctioning piece of equipment that needed to be replaced. After witnessing so much toxicity in the modern workplace, I spent years studying employee engagement and the myriad ways organizations are getting it wrong. Now I make a living sharing my passion for doing engagement the right way. I even published a book about it, to boot.

In the following pages, I will be dismantling the contemporary understanding of employee engagement and debunking the beliefs of business leaders who have unrealistic expectations for their workforce. Using anecdotes from my consulting practice, third-party research, brain science, current events, and my own personal observations from the front lines, I am going to explain why so many organizations are failing to engage their employees and what their leaders can do to correct it. It is my assertion that, absent the factors necessary to create a compelling employee experience and value proposition, employees do not engage themselves. Leaders engage employees. They can also disengage employees. The problem is that these same leaders refuse to acknowledge the influential role they play in this dynamic. They are too far-removed from the experience of being an employee to truly appreciate the impact that their decisions, behaviors, and interactions have on talent and on the state of engagement. My aim with this book is to tell leaders what they probably already know, deep down, and what their employees are too afraid to say. Employee engagement is often referred to as a win-win situation for workers and their employers. It is, but only if employers let go of the falsehood that has become an unspoken managerial tenet of the modern workplace: The Stepford Employee Fallacy.

Part I

Why Arent Employees More Engaged?

Employee engagement has become the hot topic in business circles over the past several years. Countless experts have published statistics and factoids about the impact that employee engagement has on an organizations bottom line. Leaders are slowly coming to realize the importance of having an engaged workforce, and they have begun treating engagement as a measurable business outcome. With such a laser focus on employee engagement, it seems surprising that less than 25 percent of employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs. What gives? Shouldnt employees be more committed and going above and beyond, instead of just going through the motions? Its a mystery that continues to confound and frustrate business leaders and their HR departments. They hire consultants who help them concoct the newest, sexiest benefits and perks so they can be hip like Facebook and Google. They send out anonymous surveys and badger employees into submitting their responses. They form committees and councils to plan company picnics and softball games and pot lucks.

So much effort is spent that leaders must feel as though they are merely spinning their wheels, gaining no traction whatsoever. They start trying to forcibly mold their organizations cultures into the ideal of what engagement is supposed to look like by punishing employees who share critical feedback on what isnt working. It becomes a vicious cycle. Leaders try ineffective and superficial engagement strategies and then cant understand why employees dont put in more effort. So they blame employees for not doing a better job of engaging themselves in spite of the elements that are causing dis engagement. Instead of looking in the mirror or actually listening to employees concerns, managers and executives double down on their efforts to force engagement, creating a workforce marked by fear and apathy.