This article was originally published in Medium on October 11, 2017 by Lindsay Portnoy
Of Merriam-Webster’s seven definitions for the word engage, six include cunning attempts or calls to action while one suggests effortful and sustained action. The definitions alone bring to mind images of battlefields, exam rooms, or trust falls, just the hodgepodge of actions we attribute to the word, but are such elaborate physical activities required for one to be engaged?
Barbaric Yawp L.A. Street Art cc Mark Robinson
From education to advertising, medicine to human resources, engagement is operationalized distinctly as a term, a tool, and a way to measure sustained action. Herein lies the potential for operationalizing yet another buzzword that may hold great potential for informing practice in a variety of industries, if only we could agree on metrics worth measuring.
Consultants struggle to explain to their clients that measuring effort rather than impact is fruitless, while human resource managers grapple with measuring implicit affect to determine if employees feel like an integral part of their company. In higher education, metrics are criticized if they do not encapsulate the faculty’s ability to work within under-resourced communities, encourage wider industry collaboration, and make an impact on public policy.
According to Forbes, “engaged employees lead to higher service, quality, and productivity, which leads to…higher customer satisfaction, which leads to increased sales (repeat business and referrals), which leads to higher levels of profit, which leads to higher shareholder returns (i.e., stock price).”
Sounds like the holy grail of measurements, right? If we measure engagement as ‘doing’ something how do you know it was done? Why does it matter? What is engagement?
For all the talk of ‘engaging with people’ to impact change, a critical question remains: is engagement simply an action or is it something that effectively changes the actor?
That was a trick question of course, because I would argue that engagement is an action that changes the actor resulting in an observable change. Simply stated: engagement is only meaningful if it translates into measurable outcomes.
Engagement should result in a change in behavior, an action that cultivates learning. Learning can be tying a shoe, recalling a fact, applying a theorem, or constructing a space station.
Measure learning and you’ll likely indirectly measure engagement.
The indirect piece is key because engagement looks different depending on the actor but it results in the same outcome: a change in behavior, thinking, or doing. More on that later.
From the classroom to the boardroom, measuring engagement means measuring learning. In a weekly status meeting a team of advertising execs discusses approaches for a new marketing campaign. At another firm, execs conduct independent due diligence on campaigns from the past year to identify attributes of successfully implemented campaigns and report back on a Slack channel. Both groups are engaged but it looks different.
Similarly, you may walk into a classroom where a seasoned English educator is giving a talk on Whitman’s poetry and you might see 27 students silently faced forward entranced or are their eyes glazed over? Walk into a similar classroom and groups of students are actively discussing Hawthorne’s purpose in The Scarlet Letter, are the students moving their bodies more engaged than the students listening intently?
Is one group more engaged than the other? It depends. How much did their behavior change as a result of the experience?
Did one group of execs determine a better approach than the other? Did one group of students demonstrate deeper learning about the content?
While one group may look more active than the other, that does not mean their minds were equally vested in the activity, that they were more or less engaged.
To measure engagement you must know the objective of the activity: to identify the best marketing plan or to interpret the meaning of a great work of art. Once you know the objective you must measure it to determine if the type of activity was truly engaging.
Barbaric yawps and trust falls aside, to be engaged is only productive if as a result there is a change in behavior, affect, or knowledge. So what does productive engagement look like?