At the other end of the spectrum—both in terms of engagement scores as well as business culture and the development of a social safety net—is Latin America, which has the highest levels of engagement. “When you’re thinking about employees in Latin America, they have expectations for a more paternalistic style of leadership,” van Jaarsveld says. “So when we look at their leadership scores on this list, they rank their leadership the highest. Part of that has to do with cultural values and expectations about leadership and their expectations related to that.”
It’s important to note here that effective leadership is one of several drivers that research shows to consistently have the biggest influence on overall engagement scores. Hence, Latin America’s high overall totals. Other key drivers that promote engagement (regardless of location) include things like strong possibility of career advancement, recognition for good work, as well as the existence of effective processes and appropriate challenges and tasks.
Because domestic market influences appear to affect overall engagement scores as much as individual company practices, Crawford says it’s easier to use engagement scores to compare companies within countries rather than between them. On the other hand, he notes, “We have certainly seen that all best employers tend to share some consistent characteristics regardless of geography when compared to non-best employers. When we go into those organizations and do focus groups with employees, we hear lots of great things, we hear employees talking positively about constructive criticism. In organizations that score low we see frustration, we see management teams with low engagement scores and we hear employees talk about people managers who aren’t all that effective.”
David Zinger, a Winnipeg-based independent coach and consultant on employee engagement, also suspects that local influences are stronger than macro factors. Yet while some experts say that economic factors don’t play as big a role as corporate culture in determining engagement, Zinger believes he is seeing trends in engagement that reflect countries’ relative levels of economic health and stability. “Anecdotally, I think Canada has been doing quite well around engagement,” says Zinger. “The economic and political environment has been stronger than in some countries. The U.S. really struggled and is still struggling, and we all know what France is going through.”
Then again, van Jaarsveld speculates that economic uncertainty has the potential to boost engagement everywhere. “I would expect that employees would, right across the board, be more engaged right now,” she says. “Because they don’t necessarily have the same opportunities to find a job elsewhere that they would have had pre-recession.”
Van Jaarsveld also cautions that just because Latin America has the highest engagement levels doesn’t necessarily mean it has the best employers or best workplaces compared to the rest of the world. “A lot of the countries there have a dual labour market,” she says. “So you tend to have a small segment of the workforce that is working in full-time jobs that are well paid, with a higher level of job quality, and then you have a larger segment of the workforce that is on the periphery of the market. And so it makes sense to me that if you’re working in Latin America and you’re working in one of these better jobs, you’re going to be much more engaged, because you want to keep that job.”
Considering that Aon Hewitt’s studies include six primary engagement questions as well as questions about a total of 21 drivers that contribute to feelings about engagement, there’s a lot of micro-level data in the research to consider. Among the more telling results, Crawford singles out work-life balance. While the issue is not as powerful as some of the others mentioned above, he says the fact that work-life balance approval scores are very similar in all regions, despite the fact that people in different countries work very different schedules, underscores the fact that employee engagement studies are really best seen as relative measures against employee expectations. “Again, we can go back to the retirement age example,” he says. “In France they are ready to burn down buildings because they want to move the retirement age from 60 to 62. Here, we look at 65 as a pretty normal retirement age.” Crawford’s conclusion: “If you start to think about expectations, it starts to explain why we see different engagement levels. People will intuitively assess those six engagement questions against what they expect work should be like and what it is.”
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