Employee engagement is a topic that often blurs the lines between commitment and engagement. In any organization, having a clear vision, mission, and goals is crucial. However, to effectively achieve these objectives, it is essential to provide employees with a sense of purpose and direction. So, what are the best strategies for organizations to improve company culture and enhance employee motivation and performance?
In this week’s episode, we have a special guest, Andrew Kitchner, the Founder of New Wave Solutions, who joins us to discuss the crucial role of employee commitment in organizational success. Andrew illustrates the distinction between commitment and engagement by providing practical scenarios within organizations. His platform, New Wave Solutions, is dedicated to measuring employee commitment and uncovering effective strategies to enhance employees’ dedication to organizational goals and values.
Tune in and discover strategies to enhance commitment for your organization. Listen now!
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:42 — 40.9MB) | Embed
The Power of Commitment for Success in Organizations with Andrew Kitchner
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. The last couple of episodes, we focused quite a bit on jobs, both how we find a job as well as how we could kind of network to become better connected to some of our potential jobs. The question we’re asking today now is what happens once you get into the job because one of the problems that we have with a lot of organizations these days is employees, you’ll get your job, then it takes maybe a month or two, the new job thing, where it’s off and you wonder, “Is this what I really want? Is this what I really expected, am I really happy?” and as my guest, Andrew Kitchner, will say, “Am I really committed?” Andrew Kitchner is the founder and chief survey administrator, hope I’m getting that right, of New Wave Solutions, and he focuses on commitment rather than engagement, so that’s a good place to start.
—
Andrew, welcome to the program.
Thank you, thank you for having me.
Definitely. This is great because we’re talking about the last few episodes, the different ways people go about getting to their ideal career. We know that the process of — the applicant tracking system process is broken, the process by which people discover who they are, the way people post postings can be a little bit broken, and, now, we also have some issues that we’re going to talk about today with what happens once someone gets into a job, what employees are doing, because so many organizations, whether you’re the one at a job or you’re the one who started your company and you’re looking to keep your employees, you say that we should be focusing on commitment rather than engagement.
Yeah. I originally he was a believer in engagement. What we found was, when we were looking at what is the best predictor of long-term retention, my hypothesis was engagement. Companies are spending millions of dollars on engagement surveys. I wasn’t cocky enough to say I know better than all these companies, I assumed that these companies are measuring the best metrics. After looking at about a hundred different variables, engagement was about the 35th best predictor of long-term retention. It frankly ruined my hypothesis so it’s not like I came into this wanting this to be true. What was the best long-term predictor of retention as well as performance was a term called organizational commitment and what that means, it’s an employee’s commitment to their company’s goals, values, mission, and people, and just on an intuitive level, what I say now is when you think about something that you worked hard to achieve, whether it’s in your personal or professional life, why did you put in that discretionary effort? Very rarely will somebody say, “I put in that discretionary effort because I was engaged.” I’ve in fact never heard somebody say that. What they do say is that, “I was committed to a goal, committed to an outcome, committed to a value, committed to a group,” and so, on an intuitive level, it does make sense and, like I was saying, the statistics and the research bears it out.
So, we’ve heard so much talk about employee engagement and we know the numbers around what percentage of employees are engaged. Can an employee be committed yet disengaged?
No. So, what we see is it goes in order.
So, commitment leads to engagement. Click To Tweet
So that’s why it’s more important is because it starts with commitment, engagement is merely an outcome of that commitment.
And what you’re saying is that that’s what someone needs to work on. You need to work on getting that person to become committed and then they’ll become engaged.
And that’s one thing that I think is important to distinguish. So, because we do commitment surveys, I understand the initial reaction. A lot of employees will say, “Hey, hey, hey, I don’t want you measuring my commitment, tracking it,” and I get that, but where the responsibility falls in my mind and the way we operate is on the company, not the employee. It’s not the employee’s obligation to be committed. It’s the organization’s responsibility who foster employee’s commitment.
So, can an employee who is not committed become committed? Can you foster that through kind of some sort of workplace culture improvement or some sort of better expression of your values mission statement?
Yes.
The other way around?
And that’s exactly what we do with our commitment feedback surveys is we determine what are the best predictors or the causal factors which influence an employee’s commitment. We do that through regression so that it’s a causal relationship, not a correlational, and we’re able to say, “Okay, if you improve employee satisfaction with company culture by 10 percent, here’s how you can expect employee commitment to change,” and so we rank those what we call drivers of commitment so that companies know what to prioritize and what to expect by improving those variables.
So, is a committed employee, generally speaking, a happy employee?
Yes. Yes, they are. And it’s on a deeper level. They are willing to go through times in which they might not be happy or difficult experiences or even turn down better offers because of their alignment with the company’s goals, values, and mission. So, anybody who’s had a long-term goal, let’s say getting in shape in the gym, it’s not always fun, there are difficult times, there are sacrifices required, but people do it because of their commitment to a long-term goal or value or mission. You don’t want an employee where you’re seeking to make them happy 100 percent of the time. It’s not about happiness.
And we’ve heard so much about the current status of employee engagement, as in that’s what people usually talk about, how, whatever they say, two-thirds are disengaged with the one-third actively disengaged, sabotaging the company. When we’re talking about employee commitment, is the situation in general amongst the American workforce as dire as it is with engagement in the current state?
The reality is yes. It really is. What you have with organizational commitment, it’s composed of kind of, not to get too deep but there’s three types. Employees who want to be committed, feel like they should be committed, and feel like they need to be committed. So, need, want, and should. So you can think of need as financial, you can think of should as social, and want as in personal desire. What we see is the need is there. Not surprisingly, people need to work. That need is there. But the want and the should are what needs to be improved, mainly the want. So, yes, people might feel the social pressure to show up at their job but they don’t want to.
Yeah.
And so that desire is one of the biggest areas that needs to be improved.
And do you think, in all the surveys and all the studies, everything you’ve looked at, that want is missing because a lot of people are just working jobs that aren’t that exciting, aren’t that interesting, organizations that really don’t have that great of a mission or whatever it is? Or do you think that want comes from some other level of dissatisfaction that people get to when they get into the organization, a situation where someone maybe comes into a job, really excited about it, but then they’re, I don’t know, stifled by bureaucratic red tape or they have like office politics that gets in the way and, all of a sudden, they’re like, “I just don’t care anymore, I just wanna have my paycheck because I have to have my paycheck to pay my rent”?
Yeah, it’s a good question. So there are multiple causes. What I boil it down to is mainly two things, is, one, employees don’t believe in the mission or the goal of the company. So, let’s say you’re working for just an accounting agency, hypothetically. You might not really understand what is the goal mission purpose of that accounting agency other than to do accounting. You don’t see the bigger purpose. The other one is maybe you do believe in the bigger purpose of your organization but you don’t feel like you’re personally contributing to it. You’re more of a cog in the machine and you understand, yeah, my role is necessary, but you’re not seeing the impact of that goal or mission so you don’t have a personal connection to it.
Both of those are things that organizations can improve, based on whether it’s not seeing the mission maybe being more true to the mission, communicating it better, and as far as the individual roles, that’s where some of these red tape and office politics can come in and like fostering a culture of — I think a lot of people have mentioned that psychological safety where people can feel comfortable trying something or at least speaking up and saying, “Maybe we should try this,” and having a fair listening to their idea.
Exactly, yeah. Amy Edmondson’s concept, psychological safety, it’s very connected. So I believe her research shows that psychological safety is one of the biggest factors that leads to a lower level of avoidable deaths in hospitals, for instance. So you can imagine a nurse who feels comfortable speaking up to a surgeon, saying, “Hey, I think you’re kind of maybe doing that wrong,” or, “Did you check X, Y or Z?” If a nurse doesn’t feel comfortable doing that, kind of going to her, quote-unquote, superior and questioning something, you can understand how that would lead to a higher rate of avoidable mortalities. And so just kind of an interesting narrative there. But, yes, you can see how that psychological safety would allow that nurse to better feel connected to the mission or the goal of the hospital. She’s directly able to contribute her thoughts to that patient outcome.
And a similar result could be set of like corporations and organizations, like lost business, damaged reputation, those type of events that if someone felt like they can speak up without being retaliated against, under most circumstances, then all those things can be avoided.
Exactly, exactly. Or if a company has a set of values that maybe the employee does believe in but leadership talks more about those values on social media than they do to live up to them in real life. That’s something that we see quite often. It’s something that employees would want to be able to speak up about. But like you said, there’s often that fear of retaliation.
A company might say we value, I don’t know, just minimizing our impact on the environment, let’s just say, and then some employee will say, “Well, look at what you’re doing over there, that’s not really consistent with those values.”
Yeah. You’re taking your private jet to events where you don’t need to take a private jet, but you like private jets.
With the situation we have right now, and I’m going to assume that whether we’re talking about engagement or employee commitment, it’s kind of the same idea that the majority of people are not really committed to their jobs, for one reason or another. What do you think is the number one thing that, in general, people who are leading organizations or entrepreneurs that have their own business that are starting to hire up some employees needs to do to kind of improve the picture on that or at least buck the trend and saying, “This is gonna be the place where people are happy to come to work and it’s gonna be the place where people aren’t all like,” I don’t know, “zombies, dreading it,” all the things you say about these disengaged, uncommitted employees at organizations.
The biggest thing I would say is give employees a voice. Now, I’m in that space, obviously, with the surveying side but a lot of surveys, for instance, a company will administer a survey but you’ll see a low participation rate because employees don’t believe that their voice is going to lead to meaningful changes. Employees are okay with issues in the organization. They don’t expect a flawless organization. They don’t expect flawless mission, values, goals.
So, actually making sure you’re giving employees a voice so that they can have a meaningful impact on the organization is the number one piece of advice that I would give.
One of the things I talk about quite a bit on this podcast, this idea of a one-size-fits-all solution being rejected over the past, say, a couple of decades. I think of the culture, the 20th century is very much a one size fits all, everyone’s supposed to do this, everyone’s supposed to do that, and we’re supposed to work these hours, everyone’s supposed to get married at this age, whatever you want to do with every one of our institutions and now we’re realizing everyone’s a different person and so does that mean it’s hard to like just say one thing such as, “Okay, people want better health care benefits,” that may be true of one organization but not of another one?
Exactly, exactly, and that’s why it is hard to answer that question of what’s the one thing companies can do, but the answer, give employees a voice, is it allows for that variability. So, employees within one organization might be voicing something different than another organization, but every organization, by giving employees a voice, open kind of an opportunity to have employees express what’s most important to that.
Does that message differ at all between, say, the six-person startup and the 10,000-plus person company?
So the importance of giving employees a voice does not change as far as it being crucial. What happens is, with a growing organization, if you’re three people and you’re going to go to 50, what the risk is there is employees losing their voice. So, when you have just three people, employees are going to have a voice. As you grow, the degree to which they feel they can voice their opinions, thoughts, feelings is going to potentially decrease. That’s the concern. Once you have an organization of 10,000 people, you’re already at the point where employees might feel like they’ve lost their voice. So it’s the same idea but at different stages.
And so that growth thing may even apply to, say, an acquisition situation where someone exits a company, startup usually builds a couple dozen, maybe even a few hundred employees, sold off because the owners exit. Now, all of a sudden, someone that was, say, three levels from the president of the company, CEO, whoever’s in charge of a small company is now suddenly eight or nine levels deep, probably never going to ever meet the CEO of this new organization.
Not only that, but now they’re following different leadership. So they might have believed in the goals, values, and mission of the original company before it was acquired. After that acquisition, now they have a new leadership, a new company, maybe they believe in the goal, mission, and values more or the same, but maybe they don’t or maybe they’re just not as aware of it as they were with the smaller company that they were a part of. So, making sure there’s that alignment and clarity is very crucial during mergers and acquisitions, especially if there’s a change in leadership.
Which is most people, even if the company, maybe you’re not reporting to a different person day to day because you’re still in that part of the organization but there’s still a whole bunch of policies that are now suddenly different and people may not even understand why.
Exactly, exactly.
Right. So, I also want to talk a little bit about your story. What inspired you to start New Wave Solutions? What brought you to wanting to provide these employee surveys for companies?
So, believe it or not, growing up, I wasn’t telling everybody, “Hey, I really wanna be in the survey industry,” other than playing baseball, they want to be firefighters, I want to do surveys. That wasn’t, when I grew up, wishing for it.
You weren’t that kid on the baseball team asking, “How committed are you to this little league baseball team?”?
Not quite, not quite, although a lot of people say that I could have been. But really what it came from was in undergraduate, I was studying economics and I felt like I was missing the behavior side of things, kind of the individual differences. Then, in grad school, I was studying neuropsychology and what I was interested in is long-term retention, both on the economics and the psychology side. Where it kind of started was, truthful, that was just an interest to me. I talked to some people and they’ve been at a company for 40 years and other people can’t stay at their company for four years. Why is that? There’s a growing cost and frequency of turnover within the United States and I don’t think that’s a good thing. I think that opportunity to be able to change, I want that opportunity to exist, but if employees feel like they want to or should regularly change jobs, I would rather that not be the case, not because they’re forced into staying at their job but because they want to stay at their job. And so the research, as far as engagement being the best predictor, that research being wrong, and commitment being by far the best predictor, even though it challenged my preconceived notions, my assumptions, my hypothesis, I felt like that was something that organizations needed to know because companies were spending over a billion dollars a year on engagement surveys and they were doing that under the assumption that it’s the best predictor of these desired outcomes. So that’s half of it. The other half is, to me, it felt very rare that there was an opportunity to help an organization at the same time you’re helping the employees, but an employee survey, if done right, it’s one of the rare opportunities where you can help both sides at the same time in a genuine way.
If you’re helping employees, you’re helping the company, and if you’re helping the company, you’re helping employees. Click To Tweet
So it was kind of one of those rare consulting opportunities where, if done right, everybody wins. It’s a genuine win-win-win. That’s kind of also what attracted me and kind of keeps me going.
So it sounded like a situation where you allowed your curiosity about something to foster an exploration. Is there something about your mindset going into it that kind of allowed this whole business idea to flourish? Because I know some people who have ideas and they really want to be right and might react a little bit differently to basically finding out that they’re wrong and something else was right.
I’m not immune from wanting to be right, believe it or not. I wanted engagement to be the best predictor. Because that was my hypothesis, I wanted my hypothesis to be right. But the experiment started based on just essentially first principles. So, first principles is essentially starting with what do you know to be true beyond a reasonable doubt. What we know is that first principles is we want a variable, which is best kind of barometer or predictor of desired outcomes. That basic premise or structure is what we know now which variable is going to be the best predictor of those desired outcomes, that’s kind of where we need to take a step back and say, “To be honest, we’re not sure,” and that’s why we looked at a hundred different variables. So, to give you an idea of the breadth of variables we looked at, not just engagement, commitment, satisfaction, we looked at caffeine consumption, we looked at the commute time, the degree to which family lived around you, friends lived around you, the degree to which you had friends at work. It was a wide range of a hundred different variables and, obviously, we anticipated some results not to be strong predictors, like I wasn’t sitting there thinking caffeine intake is going to be a really strong predictor of retention, but there was some evidence of it and so we included it in the hundred variables we looked at. And then, from there, we just let the data tell the truth and all we did from there was just report the truth. So that’s what we want to do. We want to remove the subjectivity from this, just like we want to remove the subjectivity from action planning with surveys, we don’t want to go in assuming what we know employees want. What we want to determine is objectively which changes are going to impact commitment the most and remove subjectivity from that process.
And so that’s the same thing people need to do, say, if you’re exploring career opportunities and you want to know what’s going to make you happy or if you’re starting a business, starting a business is all experimentation as to what’s going to work, what type of marketing is going to work, what type of delivery of your content, delivery of your product, what options are going to work best, and so anyone in a situation, anyone out there listening, who’s in the phase of exploring, whether it be a new job or a new business, it’s a good idea to kind of take out that subjectivity and almost have this omnipresent look at it and saying, “I’m a reporter, I’m an investigator, I have this, I have my first idea but this is just my first guess. Anything else could potentially be my target market, my people might need something completely different.”
Yeah, exactly. Especially with starting a business, you need to start with what’s definitely true. One thing I say when I talk to other people starting a business and the conversation I had with myself was, okay, most small businesses fail. That’s just truth. Pretending like that’s not true will not give you any advantage. Now, you need to be confident, sure, but not confident beyond a point of objectivity. So, if you’re starting a business, you need to realize that you need to provide more value or be different enough from what’s already on the market to distinguish yourself from the bigger players and that’s the only way that you survive as a smaller business is you need to be clearly distinguishable and better than what’s already on the market. If you’re just a little bit different, just a little bit better, that’s not going to be enough. And that’s a tough conversation. Because it’s a difficult conversation to have with yourself doesn’t make it a not necessary conversation.
And so is your employee commitment surveying kind of distinct from employee engagement survey the way you gained traction into the market?
Yeah. Two main differences — well, maybe three, but one is commitment set of engagement. So nobody was measuring commitment when we first started and so that was a distinguishable aspect of our company. Another one is that, for the most part, with free responses, we read those by hand. So, instead of just analyzing those with automated software, we actually go through and we read each response, the premise being is if employees take the time to share their feedback, we owe them the time to read that feedback. It’s a pretty basic premise but very few companies do that. Most will do a word cloud and that’s how they’ll represent the data. The problem is that you’ll overlook important but uncommon responses. So, in the most extreme example, there’d be an instance of sexual harassment but only one out of 1,000 comments mentioned that so it wouldn’t show up in the most mentioned responses, it wouldn’t show up in the word cloud, it wouldn’t show up in these automated analyses but it’s arguably the most important response out of every single one. So that’s a good example of why we do it. And then the third difference is kind of what you’re saying as far as a one size fits all, we have a structure that is consistent in terms of how we build our surveys but we allow the flexibility, both in terms of the questions we ask, so if a company wants to explore another potential driver of commitment, let’s say diversity, equity, and inclusion, they want to add in those questions, great, we add those in, and then also as far as how we present the results in the dashboard, we build each dashboard for each client and we customize it. So, we don’t believe in the one-size-fits-all solution and we don’t believe in the just kind of do-it-yourself software. We want to customize the solution, both on the surveying side and the results side, in order to best suit the organization’s structure and their objectives.
So given that you we read each survey response and that you kind of design each report dashboard specifically for each customer, does that strain your resources in a way that makes it difficult to manage your expenses and your own labor and your own employees?
Yeah, it’s a good question. So, as far as how we manage the cost of that, what we do is we have contract workers, so we bring in workers as we need them. So, we have essentially a Rolodex of trained researchers who are qualified and able to do these analyses but we only need to bring them in as work demands it. The downside is can we grow as fast? No, we absolutely cannot grow as fast. There is a clear downside. We would rather be a better company that grows slower rather than a faster growing company that’s worse. And so sustainable growth through value add is kind of the underlying premise there and, yeah, there’s a downside as far as how fast we can grow what our profit margin is but that’s something we accepted a long time ago.
Yeah, it’s just a completely different business strategy. Now, that being said, do you desire to grow even just for the reason of having that impact or are you kind of somewhat content with the slow growth and staying at the market penetration that you have?
All the cards on the table, we do want to grow. We are growing and we’re the number one commitment surveying firm in the entire world. Now, I often get asked, “Okay, but what about people copying your idea?” The reality is I want companies to copy this idea. If it’s a better metric, go ahead and copy it. I want all these companies that are measuring engagement to take a step back and go, “Hey, maybe this commitment thing is real.” So whether it be Gallup or these other companies that are measuring engagement, it doesn’t invalidate what we’re doing for them to copy us. I don’t hide these questions from other companies. I don’t try and patent my way around them being able to do what we’re doing.
If more survey companies measure commitment and more survey companies actually read responses, everybody benefits. Click To Tweet
The market is big enough for everybody and it’s growing year after year. So, if there are more companies that are spending more time reading responses and not overlooking those responses like sexual harassment allegations, I’m all for it. I’m all for it. I want them to copy our ideas.
And I just think about my knowledge about the natural language processing, NLP, which is what a lot of people use on that and how, yeah, that never occurred to me my head but that would miss something like that because it’s really only looking at words and combination of words and how they either rank in importance, how you can make them into a pretty looking word cloud, or any other kind of just report.
And I get asked about that and AI and NLP pretty often. I want that to be as good as people reading responses by hand. The reality is we’re not quite there yet and we don’t do anybody any favors by pretending we are. Now, I want us to be able to get to that point, that would be ideal, to have it be just as good, but it’s not. We’re not quite there yet.
So it sounds like your primary motivation is the impact of your business. What do you see so far in your business as the impact? Do you see your impact on employee wellbeing, on employee retention? What’s the primary thing you’re seeing that’s happening because organizations are engaging with your company and your surveys?
Yeah, retention improvement is by far the number one thing we see. And through retention improvement is cost savings. So, on the low end, an instance of turnover can cost an organization 30 percent of an employee’s salary all the way up to 250 percent of an employee’s salary. One industry we’ve been working a lot in is school districts. A lot of school districts are in the red and they’re losing more teachers than they can replace and so you look at the benefit of what if you can improve teacher retention. Well, not to get too meta but, I mean, that improves the society. If you can have a better teacher-to-student ratio, you can retain more of the high quality teachers, that literally will affect the community. Like I said, if done well, this is something that helps both the employees and the employers and that’s just rare.
Now, the average employee tenure at any particular organization, I think I recently read a few different surveys, they all put them somewhere around four years and I know that’s a sharp decline from whatever it was in the 1970s. Now, the world in the 1970s is probably not coming back because technology, things change quicker and quicker. Do you think that the number should be four or do you think that a healthier society where people are happier and more committed to jobs, where would you see that number in like an ideal healthy world that you’re trying to create?
It’s hard to give an exact number but I would expect it to be higher than what it is now because we’re not at the commitment level now where we could be. It should be higher than it is now, but you’re right, it’s not what it’s going to be in the ’70s and that’s because the power in the labor market has shifted more towards the employees. So, remote work has expanded the amount of opportunities that an employee can have. They can apply to more companies in a bigger radius than they used to be able to. So you would expect the number to be lower than what it was but higher than what it is.
So, something probably in between accepting the reality that people are going to change jobs more often than the era where so many people would get a job out of high school and stay at the same company from high school to retirement, you’d have like a 40-year career or something at the same company. But, obviously, you’re saying is that that number, whether it’s 4.1 or 4.2, whatever it exactly is, is reflecting a lot of people who are changing jobs just because their organization is not really inspiring them.
Yeah, not fostering that commitment. And if you ask employees, most employees don’t want to change jobs. They feel like they should or need to. You ask most employees would you rather work for a company that fosters a true sense of commitment and a company that you want to work at, a company that you feel like you should work at, that you believe in the mission, and you’re there kind of long term, that’s a much better alternative than job hopping, even for employees.
Yeah, the job search process that we outlined in the previous episode about the SmartRank and the ATS system is something that’s very, very daunting and it’s pretty messed up, to be 100 percent honest, but it’s not something I think anyone really enjoys doing, which is why some people even dread getting laid off from a job that they’re not committed to because they just don’t want to go through that process. It is daunting and it is extremely wasteful right now.
A lot of it comes down to why are they changing. So, if they go from one job in which they’re committed to another job in which they’re committed, that’s better than them job hopping because none of these companies are fostering their commitment.
Yeah. So, I also want to touch base a little bit on the future. A lot of people say that in post-World War Two America, the 1950s, whatever you want to call it, companies used to commit to their employees and people would generally have a lifetime stint at a company, stuff like that, and then the era of layoffs, outsourcing, other change kind of shifted in a little direction and now we’re seeing a trend where, whatever you want to call the Great Resignation or the Great Rethink, people thinking this through, employees are asserting themselves a little bit more and saying, “I want this, I want that.” Where do you see this going in the future? I don’t know, you probably see a couple of different scenarios, but what trends should we be looking out for with regards to workplace culture and with regards to how people show up and commit to their jobs?
So, one thing we’re going to continue to see is that the importance of retaining top talent is going to be increasingly important. So, what is going to distinguish one company from another company in that same industry is going to be their talent. In more of the agricultural era, people that pick the strawberries are not going to differentiate a company very much. Whereas now, roles are more complex. As the complexity of the roles within a company increase, you see two things. One is, on the good side, a better employee will value add more than it used to. The second thing is losing a good employee will cost more than it used to. And because of both the upside increasing and the downside increasing, you’re going to see more effort be put into retaining employees. And so as long as the cost of turnover continues to increase, so too will the effort to retain employees.
And is there going to be a focus on, when you refer to retaining good employees versus retaining just any employees, like do you have versions of your survey that weight responses based on who is considered a top performer versus who is considered everyone else?
What we actually see is that commitment is one of those best barometers. Now, we have like employee net promoter score surveys which can differentiate into categories, but when you get employees that are generally over a 50 out of 100, so 50 percent committed, those are the employees you want to keep and that’s better than keeping an engaged employee. Those are going to be the top performers, because they’re going to put in that discretionary effort.
So you’re saying that there’s a higher correlation between an employee’s commitment and performance in there as between their engagement and performance.
A strong difference between the two.
And can there still be committed employees that just aren’t good, for some reason, one reason or another, their skills are not right for that job role and somehow something got messed up or they have the wrong personality for it or something?
That would be the case. It’s job mismatch. So that’s really the only case. There would be a committed employee who is not a good fit. In those cases, yeah, there’s going to be an issue, but the job role being mismatched for the job holder, that’s something that’s picked up on pretty quickly. It doesn’t necessarily need to be measured, it’s going to be picked up on.
And if someone is committed but in a mismatched job role, do you think it’s economically better decision to try to find them a role within the organization that does match them versus just letting them go? I know that’s kind of more of an option for the bigger organization, sometimes you can’t really do that in a small one, but does that make more sense economically?
Yeah, it does, kind of a lateral transfer, because they believe in the mission of the company, they’re willing to put in that discretionary effort, you just need to match them with the right role and that’s where kind of the increase in lateral transfer opportunity is and needs to continue to increase.
So we’re going to see more emphasis on retaining employees, especially the committed ones, which, generally speaking, are going to be the well performing ones or the potentially well performing ones, if you just put them into a different role with a lateral transfer. Does that mean that some of the other changes, I know right now we’re in a situation where some organizations are trying to get people to return to office on a regular schedule and other people want to keep a lot of the remote work and some of the flexibilities, do you see any specific outcomes with some of these debates about work culture or do you see them more as an organization by organization situation of just letting the employees have a voice?
It’s an organization by organization, industry by industry difference. The people who think we’re going back to completely in office across the board, they’re wrong. We’re not going back. Now, there are some industries that are going back and that’s not to say that they’re doing it wrong or it’s not going to work, but the people who think that, across the board, all these industries are going to end up back in person, they’re wrong and they’re going to pay the price for it. Not only are they going to have less interested employees, the radius that they can pull from is going to be smaller.
And so when you are already needing to focus on hiring the best talent and you voluntarily restrict who you can hire and you voluntarily enforce a mandate that is going to restrict who wants to work for you, you’re going to pay the price.
Speaking of those mandates, I don’t want this to all be about throwing shade but are there any other common practices that you’ve seen, either currently or over the past decade or so, trying to, say, increase employee retention and employee engagement or employee performance that have been a little bit off the mark?
Yeah, there have been, the kind of general cliché of put a ping pong table in the break room and stuff, that’s not going to do it. It’s honestly sad because these companies that even put a ping pong table in the break room, they generally have good intentions. It’s not like they’re mindlessly doing it. They’re doing it with good intentions, but they’re not spending the time to objectively determine which changes are going to improve retention the most. Like we were talking about before, they’re subjectively inputting their own opinion rather than relying on objective measures and objective responses and analyses to determine what changes to prioritize. So, kind of that idea of the subjectivity getting removed is something that needs to happen more and we’re not there yet.
So, if someone listening really wants to improve the performance and retention of their team, the best thing they can do is somehow survey their employees or talk to their employees, get some information, and look at it subjectively without inserting their own preconceived biases or their own ideas and be ready to hear what they are going to hear from their employees, essentially.
I’ll be biased here, the best thing they can do is reach out to me and not just because I can sell and provide the services, what I will do, like I do for everybody, is I’ll tell them specifically how do we measure commitment, how do we determine which changes are going to lead to the most improvement and commitment, then if they want to do it themselves, I’ll wish them well, and if they want me to do it, then I’ll do it for them. I won’t hold back our strategy from them. I’m not looking to put that strategy behind a price wall. Like I’ve said before, I want to push that out to — as biased as it might sound, the best thing they can do is reach out.
And how would someone, if anyone listening out there wants to reach out to you get a hold of you? What’s the best way?
The easiest way is LinkedIn. Just message me on LinkedIn and that can work. They can text or call me. I am fine putting my phone number out there. 714-496-2984. Text me and call me. But I’m pretty active on LinkedIn and you can find me there under Andrew Kitchner. Again, New Wave Solutions is the company. You’ll find me.
That’s Kitchner, in case anyone —
I appreciate that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that’s amazing, Andrew. Thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, for giving us some great ideas, which, at one level, could sound a little bit complicated, but on another level, it sounds like you can just essentially listen to your employees, give them a voice, and be ready to hear what they’re going to say to you regardless of what you want the problem to be, what you think the solution should be.
Exactly, exactly.
Removing that personal subjectivity and replacing it with statistical objectivity. Click To TweetYeah, and so the data, the information should tell you the story, rather than you having a story and just looking for data to fit into your story.
Exactly, exactly. That’s difficult to do but once you do it, you start seeing the benefits of it.
Well, I hope more organizations see the benefits of it and I hope more people are happy at work. That’s been one of my goals for a long time. But also, I hope more people are committed because I think you have a point about this idea between the short-term happiness like, “Okay, I went to the bar with my friends last night, that made me happy in the moment,” but you have a situation where you’re like, “Well, I built a business that really matters to society and really has a role for me to play,” and that makes you happier in a much more long-term way, which sounds much more similar to the outcomes of an organization that improves their employee commitment.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that’s why it’s great what you’re doing. I know you’re getting to 100 episodes so appreciate what you’re doing as well.
Yeah, fantastic. I’m just trying to improve the human experience in so many ways and tell people that you don’t have to do what you feel like you’re supposed to do, you should do something that’s a reflection of yourself, whether it be starting a business, whether it be going to a different job, or whether it be finding another way, such as some of the previous episodes we had about forming communities, even like fitness challenges and things like that, if that’s going to bring you that satisfaction, if that’s going to make you wake up every morning and say, “I have a reason to be awake and I have a reason to be alert and not on drugs or drunk,” or whatever, constantly staring at Instagram all day, that’s going to make a much more happier human race.
Yeah, and one that’s filled with meaning.
Yeah, for sure. Well, I’d also like to thank everybody out there listening, for listening to this episode and the other episodes and encourage you to tune in to Action’s Antidotes for more episodes of people who have followed their passions, whether it be a story of exploring curiosity, like Andrew did, or whether it be a story of asserting something they really wanted or finding a different way to orient their lives away from the script and I wish you all a wonderful rest of your day wherever you are.
Thanks, Stephen.
Important Links:
About Andrew Kitchner
Andrew Kitchner is the Founder and CEO of New Wave Solutions, an employee surveying firm that has surveyed more than 500K employees since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. His background in economics & neuropsychology has led him to developing research that focuses on predicting and improving long-term retention. Andrew and his team use customized employee surveys to help their clients measure and improve Employee Commitment instead of Employee Engagement.