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Have you noticed that despite all those “Best Places to Work” awards, “Happy Office” titles, “Healthy Place to Work” badges, and “Employee Happiness” and “Wellbeing” accolades—not to mention the billions poured into engagement, wellbeing, and happiness programs—the workforce remains dissatisfied, and those engagement and wellbeing scores barely budge?
HR is Struggling
They are struggling for multiple reasons but in this article let’s talk about skipping the work that is required to fix organisations. Everyone (Leaders included not only HR) is focused on the wrong thing; scores, certifications, badges, awards, programs etc. but nobody wants to do the dirty work of fixing the environment in which employees operate. Recently, someone pointed out that mature markets are focused on finding real, sustainable solutions, whereas developing markets are often fixated on fast growth, looking impressive, and grabbing whatever looks shiny. It’s like these emerging markets are in their teenage phase—focused on appearances, with little concern for depth. That’s how I see HR/organisational initiatives that yield no results. Teenage efforts - futile.
No certification or award will fix your problem. You actually must do the work.
So what happens when workplace certifications no longer attract talent, build your brand, or help HR? What happens when your engagement survey score is good yet, you have a high turnover or a dissatisfied workforce?
We spoke to hundreds of HR professionals, business leaders, and employees and looked at research data. Here is what we found:
HR professionals say they're done with hollow certifications that make no real impact or hold them against certain standards. However, some are forced to continue with them and some have no time or energy to do something better even do they know what they do now is a waste of time and money.
Employees have also lost trust in many workplace certifications that promise a great or happy work environment, only for them to join and find that reality falls far short of the hype. They have entered too many organisations with those awards and certifications that failed to meet the set expectations. Credibility lost.
One of HR’s biggest challenges is the overwhelming number of engagement surveys that yield little to no actionable insights. Even when they find a solid survey tool, they’re often left without the guidance to translate insights into meaningful actions that enhance employee experience.
Instead of expert human advice, they’re left with AI solutions that lack the nuance to address the unique needs of their workplace. When they are provided help to address workplace issues, external consultants are not experts within the field and hence are of little to no use to them.
Then there’s the confusion between employee engagement, employee experience, and employee wellbeing. HR professionals struggle to differentiate and align these concepts, often resulting in fragmented strategies that fail to deliver meaningful results.
Here I talk about this topic in more detail:
But let’s go back to this question: What happens when your engagement, wellbeing, or happiness survey score is good yet, you have a high turnover or a dissatisfied workforce? I’ll tell you what exactly happens. You are measuring the wrong thing. You are measuring something important to you, not the workforce. When your data shows something but reality (anecdotal evidence) proves otherwise, always listen to reality. You cannot run surveys without listening to the workforce. There is no point to it. And this is where HR goes wrong. They rely and focus on the scores, not on reality.
The work that will impact your score is in the reality of everyday interactions employees have with the organisation. But HR doesn’t measure that so they cannot fix problems because they are blind to them. They have no data on talent attraction, hiring, onboarding, performance management, talent development or departure experiences. They have no data on the experiences of their employees with leadership, management, training, HR processes or anything really that would allow them to create workplaces that are great to work at.
Newsflash: your badge or certificate doesn’t mean you’re a good, best, happy, or healthy place to work. It means that the company sold you a survey, and you got a participation certificate. When qualifying scores are as low as 65%, are we actually proud to put this badge out? When wellbeing or happiness awards are given because there was nobody else in that category or we paid for it, can we really be proud, or do we truly feel that we deserve this? Does it really give us the satisfaction and pride that would come from doing the hard work and being recognized by our employees for our efforts, rather than by some external organization that never spoke to our employees? Why are we happy with participation certificates and trophies instead of our efforts and employee satisfaction?
Clearly, we are not. Beacuse most HR people we spoke to want to do the work they just either don’t know how or don’t have the resources. The tech industry has flooded the market with all sorts of surveys from culture, wellbeing, and engagement to happiness but they are not the solution to the workforce’s problem. The solution is in the hard work that comes after the surveys and this is what is not being done. Focusing on surveys hoping they will fix our culture is like buying a scale but not doing the diet and the exercise. You will end up checking your weight but nothing more. Focusing on survey results is like measuring employee performance once a year (the hated annual appraisal) but failing to manage it every day throughout the year. Do we even have the right to measure performance when we fail to manage it daily?
The hard work is in these areas of the employee lifecycle, and if you're not doing the work within these areas, you're not doing anything to create a great/happy/healthy/best place to work. Have the badge, award, and certificate if you really insist but that shouldn’t exempt you from the work that needs to be done.
PS: Some organizations are getting it right, like ING, which developed a comprehensive employee experience structure, measuring everything they can and improving the organization one interaction at a time—with fantastic results! At The Strengths Company, we use the same method. It is hard work but worth it.
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