Background

There have been several blogs, books, articles, whitepapers, and other publications about the importance and need for employee engagement. In her post, Iulia Alina Cioca’s cites a Bersin study in which 71% of companies measured employee engagement.

If employee engagement is “the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals” [see Kevin Kruse’s article in Forbes], why is this so important to HR departments? In her article, Cioca examines how it relates to performance, but unfortunately, Cioca found employee engagement to be weakly linked to performance:

“Contrary to popular belief, the meta-analysis found that employees who are satisfied with their job and committed to their organization do not perform much better than their peers who were not. In fact, job satisfaction and organizational commitment are weakly linked to employees’ performance when they are all measured at the same point in time. And the link becomes even weaker if time passes before measuring performance. If employees’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment increase by one unit, their performance after 7 to 12 months goes up by only 0.02 units. And this is true for both employees’ task performance and extra-role performance (behaviours that are not directly expected or rewarded, such as helping colleagues with their work).

In conclusion, changes in employees’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment result in very small and barely measurable changes in performance.”