The data on whether employees are engaged says that the answers are Yes, No and Sometimes.

Engagement: Lies, Damned Lies and WTF II

Earlier this week, I had an amazing three hour session on the phone. Back to back, I discussed engagement with three different vendors. (It must be the flavor of the week because I scheduled another several calls on the same topic).

It’s May and the spring crops of white papers are blooming. Since engagement is the holy grail at the C-Level (or so it seems), an unsurprising number of companies have tried to position themselves as engagement experts. Here’s what I’m juggling:

• Visier, the amazing workforce analytics company, says that 70ish percent of employees are not engaged. They are citing this DeLoitte Report.
• Gallup, the mother of all employee engagement analysis companies, uses a very similar 70% number. Here’s the executive summary.
• IBM, on the other hand, says 70% of employees are happily engaged. Here’s their study.
• Quantum Workplace (a remarkable engagement analysis firm) deliver data that says that 67% of employees of companies that compete for Best Workplace awards are engaged while 38% of those in other companies are engaged. Here’s a snapshot of their data.

Talk about your basic set of contradictory data. To summarize, the data on whether employees are engaged says that the answers are Yes, No and Sometimes. The differing pictures painted by each data set have a ‘through the looking glass’ feel to them.

A naive thinker would probably think that if 70% are disengaged, it’s pretty much impossible that 70% are happily engaged.

Maybe it’s just me.