courtesy of www.teacherinmexico.blogspot.com

This is about the interviewing process and the lack of problem solving questions. Tending to hire the Essence of the employee (commonly known as a Warm Body) and not the being (the curious, questioning, challenging thinker)? Currently it appears that Employee Engagement dominates in the interview process. However all experienced H.R. managers know that in the end he or she who is least disqualified wins.

The real employee engagement should be driven and controlled by the direct managers who are in daily contact with the employee more than corporate dictums that are issued from on high by a centralized corporate Human Resources department. I challenge companies to take an audit of the expense they have expended in the name of Employee Engagement at the corporate or social level of the company in the last ten years and contrast that against the turnover rate and labor costs of ten years ago?

The mindset appears as interpreted by reading common questions are to find someone who won’t cause problems and will just go out there grab an Oar and keep rhythm with the existing group of employees. The fallacy here is it isn’t working and turnover and quit rates are just as high or higher?

The national average turnover rate according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics is still the same or worse after all the so called improvements and dare I say expense in Employee Engagement and professionally trained H.R. Recruiting staff.

The latest turnover rates listed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics is 3.2% per month or over 37% per year of that 1.8% was people quitting their jobs or an annualized rate of 21.6%. Why is this so important?? Because Employee Engagement is screwing things up in the work environment and making life difficult for managers. Link to statistics below.

http://www.bls.gov/jlt/

By Alison Doyle

April 11, 2014

• Have you ever had difficulty working with a manager?
• Have you worked with someone who didn’t like your work?
• How did you fit in with the company culture?
• Who was your best boss and who was the worst?
• Describe your ideal boss.
• Why are you leaving your job?
• Why do you want to change jobs?
• Why were you fired?
• Why were you laid-off?
• Why did you quit your job?
• Why did you resign?
• What have you been doing since your last job?
• Why have you been out of work so long?
• Why weren’t you promoted at your last job  

This is a list of my suggested questions designed to explore the Being or Thinking part of the potential candidate that I have put together. These can be improved upon easily by adapting them to your particular departments and type of business.

1. What percent of sales do you think a company actually gets to keep as profit after taxes?
2. Have you ever discovered or suggested an idea that improved the results of your company? Example?
3. What would you do or recommend if the cost of labor suddenly went up or the level of production output went down?
4. What kind of waste have you observed in other companies regarding material or parts? How would you reduce that?
5. We are in the XYZ widget business can you think of any products or services that we should also offer?
6. What is the worst situation you ever witnessed with customer service and what could be done to turn that customer around?

Yeah, now let’s talk about employee engagement! Beginning with the definition offered below on Wikipedia under Employee Engagement.

This is dry and technical but illustrates in my opinion the absurdity of it!

William Kahn provided the first formal definition of employee engagement as “the harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances.” Kahn (1990). 

In 1993, Schmidt et al. proposed a bridge between the pre-existing concept of ‘job satisfaction’ and employee engagement with the definition: “an employee’s involvement with, commitment to, and satisfaction with work. Employee engagement is a part of employee retention.” This definition integrates the classic constructs of job satisfaction (Smith et al., 1969), and organizational commitment (Meyer & Allen, 1991).

Defining employee engagement remains problematic. In their review of the literature in 2011, Shuck and Wollard ^[2] identify four main sub-concepts within the term:

1. “Needs satisfying” approach, in which engagement is the expression of one’s preferred self in task behaviors.
2. “Burnout antithesis” approach, in which energy, involvement, efficacy are presented as the opposites of established “burnout” constructs: exhaustion, cynicism and lack of accomplishment.
3. Satisfaction-engagement approach, in which engagement is a more technical version of job satisfaction, evidenced by Gallup’s own Q12 engagement survey which gives an r=.91 correlation with one (job satisfaction) measure.^[3]
4. The multidimensional approach, in which a clear distinction is maintained between job and organizational engagement, usually with the primary focus on antecedents and consequents to role performance rather than organizational identification.

Definitions of engagement vary in the weight they give to the individual vs the organization in creating engagement. Recent practice has situated the drivers of engagement across this spectrum, from within the psyche of the individual employee (for example, promising recruitment services that will filter out ‘disengaged’ job applicants ^[4]) to focusing mainly on the actions and investments the organization makes to support engagement.^[5]

These definitional issues are potentially severe for practitioners. With different (and often proprietary) definitions of the object being measured, statistics from different sources are not readily comparable. Engagement work remains open to the challenge that its basic assumptions are, as Tom Keenoy describes them, ‘normative’ and ‘aspirational’, rather than analytic or operational – and so risk being seen by other organizational participants as “motherhood and apple pie” rhetoric.^[6]

Are You still here? do you see the technical overkill of the simple employee / employer relationship that should be effectively handled by well trained managers.

This kind of thinking immediately makes me think about the struggles our military has with the rules of engagement. To try and follow this intellectual and psychological jargon approach to dealing with your employees has to be a burden and constraint to your front line and middle managers. Below is a link to a story about the difficulty and complexity of the military rules of engagement.

Read here about how the military is so bogged down with lawyers and senior officers back in Washington hashing over and rehashing the politically correct responses of what to do in every type of situation. http://www.armytimes.com/article/20120423/NEWS/204230316/Shifting-guidelines-prompt-calls-ROE-reform

So here is the bottom line in my opinion, after all the millions if not billions have been spent on the Employee Engagement trend in the last twenty years.

1. The annual turnover is the same or worse than in previous years. I remember it being 20% in the 1980’s.                                                                                                                                                                                         
2. The most common interview questions are pretty much all geared to how the employee feels about things
3. After reading about the common questions I noticed a complete lack of questions specific to problem solving and understanding about the costs and procedures to accomplish successful business.

There is whole book on Essence and Being by Thomas Aquinas explaining and discussing the difference between the essence of a person ( warm body) as their physical presence and the being ( the curious, questioning, challenging thinker) of a person as their mind, thoughts, intellect and spirit. The coporate culture it seems tends now to be almost exclusively driven by the concept that happy employees make more widgets? The problem is that happy qualified employees may make more widgets, but will they make them better? Will they tell you when they are not being made better? Will they suggest ways to make the customers more satisfied? We seem to be interviewing for happy warm bodies?

What we need is a revival in the interviewing / onboarding process that puts more focus on whether the prospective employee will grasp the process, concepts and buy into the goal of the company. Will they be a motivated outspoken positive and constructive observer as well as contributor to the intellectual activities going on? Or will they just be happy and fit in with the other happy people.

Give me smart and curious anytime over compliant and cooperative!