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Employee Engagement vs. Employee Satisfaction

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Searches on "employee satisfaction" have dropped by half since 2004, while "employee engagement" has come from nowhere to surpass "employee satisfaction" searches in 2009.

Whenever I talk about employee engagement, I hear very different reactions:

1. "Employee engagement is just the latest buzzword for HR staff to embrace. It offers nothing materially different from employee-satisfaction research. It's just a way for consultants to sell last year's fashions at marked-up prices."
2. "Employee engagement represents an important breakthrough that links employee satisfaction to business outcomes. All employee-satisfaction research should become employee-engagement research."

One of the techniques I was taught for moderating focus groups is to assume that what the speaker says is true, from their perspective, and therefore to try to understand that perspective. So let's assume for the sake of argument that both of the above statements are true.

How might they both be true?  Employee engagement makes explicit best practices for employee satisfaction that many researchers have followed implicitly.

• Professional satisfaction research projects always focused on engagement. Employee-satisfaction research has traditionally been a measure of employees' emotional and rational satisfaction with their job and employer. Thorough researchers have always analyzed employee satisfaction as a key driver of employee retention, customer loyalty and other positive business outcomes.
• Many satisfaction projects just measure satisfaction, rather than act on it. Far too many organizations do employee-satisfaction surveys simply because they feel they need to. They make tactical changes based on the feedback, but that's it. They aren't linking employee satisfaction to customer satisfaction; they aren't linking employee engagement to quality.

So, if you've done employee-satisfaction research strategically, employee engagement to you is just a new label for an old practice. But if you've done employee-satisfaction research tactically in the past, employee engagement represents a new best practice for you to aspire to in your research.

This evolution is analogous to how customer satisfaction research has evolved into customer loyalty research. Good customer satisfaction studies always looked at loyalty, but now that connection is explicit in the new label for the domain.

So for those of you with buzzword backlash, embrace the term employee engagement: point out the practices you've done in the past that differentiate such research from tactical employee-satisfaction studies, and help us all to do a better job conducting research that will help us satisfy and engage employees to create desired organizational outcomes.

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