Rethinking employee engagement: how contentment shapes engagement

What is engagement – really?

The elusive concept of ‘engagement’ is essentially about having the people we pay to work:

• turn up most days
• focus on the right things most days
• value their jobs and have a positive mindset to their tasks most days
• value and enjoy the company of their colleagues most days

I don’t think we can say ‘every day’ at any point as part of the leadership role is having realistic expectations and, as we are all complex human beings, our emotions, attention and energy can be hugely variable.

But if we can achieve these things most days, then what we will most likely enjoy as a result is:

• high attendance, quality, productivity and retention
• low sickness, error, disengagement and wastage
• good working relationships
• less informal and formal conflict (think legal fees and HR time)

That’s what most engagement strategies are really trying to achieve.

So how do we get there? Drawing on 35 years of experience in employee relations, decades of observing human nature and a heap of good old common sense, I’ve come to believe that some of the most important influences on engagement are the ones we talk about least.

This is the first in a series of articles, starting with how contentment (or discontentment) shapes engagement. You can find links to the other articles at the end.

What do you know about contentment?

It’s been my experience that contented people tend to turn up, do the work that’s asked of them, and build strong relationships with colleagues and customers. They also tend to stick around (you might call this employee loyalty) as they don’t generally feel an urge to hunt out greener grass. Contentment cannot, therefore, be overlooked if we’re searching for a solution to employee engagement.

But over the years, I’ve become increasingly concerned that people often don’t understand what actually makes them content.

When we’re content, we can enjoy and appreciate what we have. We lean into life rather than fight against it. We do our daily jobs without resentment and accept that life is not all roses and excitement. We’re not chasing every rainbow in search of a pot of gold or endlessly living or working with this sense of pressure that so many of us are familiar with.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t be ambitious, passionate and enthusiastic. We can still want more, but we don’t need more to feel at peace.

And to be clear, while contentment creates the right conditions to make consistent performance possible, contentment does not automatically equal high performance. Someone may be content, but still lack the right attitude, clarity, skill or motivation. Performance is a different issue that needs to be addressed separately.

It’s a ‘more, more, more’ world…

But contentment in this world is severely underrated and seldom discussed. Instead, we talk about living every day as though it is our last, finding ways to achieve maximum excitement, get rich quick schemes that involve minimal effort, work from wherever you want in the world, dopamine hits, and generally living our lives in extremes of emotion, including for many, an intense fear of missing out on something.

It’s a world of more, more, more… my needs, my wants, my dreams and organisations have been increasingly pulled into this dynamic.

Socrates captured the problem perfectly: “He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.”

And surely this is why so many engagement strategies that focus on giving more, more, and more invariably fail.

If people never reach a sense of enough, then no amount of perks, budgets or initiatives will solve the problem. You are simply throwing money at the wall!

So perhaps it’s time to come at engagement from a different angle.