Every company wants highly engaged employees, to halt resignations, and to attract top-flight talent. The problem is that before companies can start engaging employees, they've got to stop aggravating those employees.
Imagine that you offered an employee the chance to work on their favorite project. That sounds like a sure-fire way to boost their engagement. But now imagine that, while they're working on that cool project, they're also experiencing a micromanaging supervisor who frequently interrupts their work, they're in daily conflict with a credit-stealing coworker, and their department is chronically understaffed because recruiters won't respond to candidates in under five days.
Even though you gave them a great benefit with their favorite project, they'll never be able to enjoy it because of the pain and frustration they're experiencing on a daily basis.
While companies are trying to engage people, they're ignoring the pains that are actually causing disengagement and resignations. And when companies conduct employee surveys, they assess the factors that could make employees engaged without pinpointing the pains that will cause employees to quit.
In the new study, Frustration At Work In 2022, Leadership IQ surveyed 2,553 employees to assess the biggest frustrations and roadblocks that were keeping them from being as productive as they could be. Some of the most revealing responses came from the open-ended question, "What's the biggest frustration at work that stops you from being as effective or productive as you would like?"
Here are some actual answers from real-life employees:
- We haven't killed off any activities that are non-value-adding, so in addition to doing important work, we're also doing activities that are useless and wastes of time (e.g., I have to write 3 reports every week that literally nobody ever reads).
- Our recruiting process is terrible (we take 5+ days to respond to candidates' applications) so even though we are dangerously understaffed, we can't manage to hire anybody.
- We got brought back to the office supposedly for collaboration but they closed all our conference rooms and we have to maintain social distancing so we don't have face-to-face meetings anyways and now I'm back to having 2 hours wasted commuting every day.
- My boss doesn't know where to find answers but he still wants me to run all requests through him, which delays me for days rather than letting me go directly to the other departments.
Every one of those frustrations could be enough to cause someone to quit, especially in this current era. And yet, every one of those frustrations is quite fixable. Now, they're not fixable if the company conducts a generic employee survey, convenes a lengthy task force to deal with high-level employee engagement, and creates a bunch of purely-performative action plans. But if the company surfaces specific frustrations department by department and then commits to fixing at least some of them, engagement will increase and resignations will slow.
On your next employee engagement survey, consider dropping a bunch of the generic scaled questions about whether employees trust their boss. Instead, ask some open-ended questions like the one above from the frustrations study. Once you've surfaced those highly-specific frustrations, start taking action. Engaging employees is a laudable goal, but relieving their frustrations will be the fastest approach to accomplishing that.
