If we learned anything from watching 16 days of Summer Olympics in Beijing, it’s this (somewhat reductionist) statement: The Chinese have been around for a long time and have invented lots of important stuff. Take the philosophy of yin and yang, which says that there are connections in the world that create two mutually correlated opposites. Think hot and cold, smart and dumb, procedural and strategic, Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan.

This got me to thinking: If yin in the workforce is employee engagement, which is about getting more discretionary effort, emotional attachment and personal commitment from workers,  then what is the opposite of that? What’s the yang?

I’m not sure I can define the opposite of employee engagement, but I know it when I see it. Today I see it in the stories about the workforce at troubled financial services firm Lehman Brothers.

Lehman, to put it mildly, is melting down. The venerable Wall Street firm was founded in 1850 and says that its mission is “defined by our unwavering commitment to our clients, our shareholders and each other.” But it’s clearly wavering. The credit and banking crisis has driven its stock price from $16 a share last week to around $4 today. Lehman seems to be following in the footsteps of Bear Stearns, and according to The New York Times, workers are struggling to deal with the notion that Lehman as it currently exists may not be long for this world.

“Everyone is walking around like they have just been Tasered,” said one Lehman employee, who, like many interviewed for an article in The New York Times , declined to be named because he was not authorized to talk publicly. “Everyone was always hoping we would pull through. Now, that is not really an option.”

And here’s how the yang of employee engagement looks, as described by the Times: “On Lehman’s third- and fourth-floor trading floors overlooking Broadway’s lights in Midtown Manhattan, traders continued working at their terminals, or at least were giving the appearance of doing so. At the same time, many polished their résumés and contacted recruiters.”

There’s also an object lesson here that you’ve heard before but bears repeating: Don’t invest too much of your future in your company’s stock. “[One] employee who left Lehman earlier this year lamented that he had put enough faith in the firm to retain shares—a decision he is paying for,” the Times noted. He told the Times simply: “My children’s education fund is wiped out.”

Employee engagement? There’s none of that today at Lehman Brothers, only shock, fear, some loathing and surely the clear understanding that no matter how committed you are to the company and its culture, once things go bad, none of that really matters anymore. When a company melts down, everyone in the workforce gets cooked with it.

It’s hard to warm up to employee engagement.

It’s a tough concept to get your head around, at least from my perspective, mainly because it is so difficult to define and measure. I’m also skeptical of a lot of the surveys and studies pertaining to engagement because I’m not always sure of what they are measuring. Here is one that seems to be able to get past that issue by comparing engagement across generations and age groups.

Also, this year’s WorkTrends Report by the Kenexa Research Institute resonated with me because it actually seemed to talk about engagement and make some sense.

According to the survey, you can summarize employee engagement with these four primary principles, or drivers, that show that workers are engaged by:

• Leaders who inspire confidence in the future.
• Managers who respect and appreciate their employees.
• Exciting work that employees know how to do.
• Employers who display a genuine responsibility to employees and communities.

Kenexa has also come up with the Kenexa Employee Engagement Index, which comprises “four key components—pride, satisfaction, advocacy and retention,” according to a Kenexa press release. “Employee engagement, therefore, is not strictly happiness, excitement or the willingness to work long hours. Engaged employees align with their organization’s goals and are personally vested in the outcomes.”
 
This employee engagement index, or EEI, is “57 percent across all surveyed countries … [and the] EEI score for India, the top-ranked country, is almost twice that of Japan’s, the lowest-ranked country,” according to Kenexa. There’s also this additional bit of perspective: “In general, EEI scores for North American employees are higher than EEI scores for European workers—the Netherlands is the exception. Outside of India, other Asian and Middle Eastern countries score lower on the EEI. As economies strengthen in other low-ranking countries like Russia and China, EEI scores could increase in future surveys.”

“Organizations can make changes to align with these critical drivers,” says Jack Wiley, executive director at the Kenexa Research Institute. “Doing so makes good business sense because it not only improves employee engagement but also drives higher quality and customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and the company’s profitability. Time and time again we see that an engaged workforce delivers superior business results.”

It’s hard to dig into this survey, since you need to jump through a few online hoops to actually buy it, but many of the findings that Kenexa touts in the press release are not exactly breakthroughs. For example, “according to the WorkTrends data, if employees are confident in their senior leaders and the future of their employer, their EEI scores are four to five times higher than those of employees who lack this confidence. Confidence levels correlate with fast-growing economies—India, Mexico and Australia all have experienced recent economic growth and their employee engagement index scores are among the highest.”

It’s not a news flash that employees who are confident in their organization’s senior leadership and future are a lot more engaged, but the interesting thing to me is how much more engaged they are. If you can find a way to turn that into a greater ROI, you have something tangible. That might help take employee engagement out of the shadows as some hard-to-figure measure, and instead make it a real, honest-to-God business metric that managers can comfortably use and understand.

Reputation is a funny thing.

Sometimes, you get adulations for a strong performance that you can’t seem to lose (think Jack Welch and what he did while CEO of General Electric, or someone like Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines). Other times, you see people who work and toil and do great things (like former Delta CEO Gerald Grinstein ) but never really get the credit they deserve for their steady hand and solid style.

If you have been in the workplace for any time at all, you probably have seen another type as well: the person who continually gets over-the-top plaudits and kudos for no apparent reason. These people usually have giant egos, are generally about style over substance and seem to get the benefit of the doubt at every turn.

They also don’t get much critical scrutiny from anyone, and they leave everybody wondering: How do they manage to keep their job?

Can’t think of anyone like this? Well, here’s a good example that comes to my mind— Oakland Athletics vice president and general manager Billy Beane.

Even if you don’t follow Major League Baseball, Beane’s case is instructive for any manager or executive anywhere, because Beane is one of these guys who is lionized at every turn for his skills as an evaluator and manager of talent without much factual evidence to back that up. He was glorified as an out-of-the-box thinker and organizational strategist in the book Moneyball, but to me, the book simply overhyped an interesting management premise that, at least in Beane’s case, hasn’t made all that much of an impact.

For example:

• Beane’s Oakland teams have never reached the World Series, never won a league championship. They’ve won some division titles, yes, but have never had any great success.

• He’s dismissive of the other managers who work for him and seems to place little value on what they do. For example, he fired manager Ken Macha the year Macha took his team to the American League Championship Series (so much for appreciating good work), and as columnist Ray Ratto in the San Francisco Chronicle points out, “Beane’s well-known view of managers [is] that you can find them working Wal-Mart aisles. His is part of the new view of the manager’s place and value … that the [field] manager works for the general manager and cannot be allowed to be a competing center of power. Beane is wrong on this, of course, otherwise there would be no such thing as a Bobby Cox, or a Tony La Russa, or a Joe Torre.”

• He will follow his Moneyball approach over the cliff, even if it means sacrificing a season as a result. This year, Oakland was competitive (within three games of a playoff spot) in the American League West race until early July, when Beane started dumping the team’s most talented and marketable players under the misguided premise that he was rebuilding for next year.

You probably know managers and executives like Billy Beane, and it raises the question: What does a guy like this have to do to get fired? Can any business executive anywhere afford to write off an entire season? No, they generally can’t, because real managers can’t afford a rebuilding year.

As one San Francisco-area blog, beyondchron.org, put it, “Beane’s lack of a championship would have had him removed from more winning-oriented teams long ago. But the Bay Area sports fan often puts style over winning. … The progressive Bay Area does not want to cheer for Goliath; we like a David who uses smarts, rather than superior resources, to prevail. And Beane’s approach fits this perfectly, even though too many fans forget that David actually slew Goliath, while the [New York Yankees], and now the well-funded [Los Angeles] Angels, consistently beat the A’s.”

Reputations get made and reputations get shattered, but sometimes in business and in life, reputations get lifted up for no discernible reason. It drives me crazy, but were it not for the example set by the Billy Beanes of the world, I’d have a whole lot less to write about. 

I’ve written before about the many challenges involved with getting Millennials (the generation born after 1980 and sometimes referred to as Generation Y) engaged and involved in the workplace. It’s not an easy task, especially since the baby boomer generation seems a lot less inclined to leave the workforce get out of the way for them.

Millennials also get a bad rap for being difficult, but as I’ve pointed out all the ones I deal with reflect what you would find in society as a whole—some are good, some average, some clueless. To my mind, that is no different from any other group in the workplace.

That’s why I was intrigued by an issue that Mary Kramer, the publisher of Crain’s Detroit Business (a sister publication of Workforce Management) blogged about this week: “Which comes first in the job hunt of a young college graduate? Find the dream job or the dream place to live?”

She writes about a conference of C-level executives she recently attended that was sponsored by Deloitte and the Michigan Economic Development Corp. Michigan in general, and Detroit in particular, have a huge “brain drain” problem because the best and brightest young workers don’t want to stay there given the terrible job market (9.7 percent unemployment in Detroit) and lack of what they consider to be “cool” jobs (attractive careers in attractive industries).

One expert argued that Michigan (and a lot of other places in America, I would think) not only needs more knowledge-based companies with higher-paying jobs, but also needs to present a more attractive lifestyle to young talent so they aren’t lured off to places like Chicago, Portland, Boston or Minneapolis. Another expert countered with the notion that talent will go where the jobs are and Michigan’s biggest problem is its high cost of doing business. He felt the state needs lower taxes and other costs of doing business so companies will grow and attract young talent to the increase in jobs and opportunity.

Kramer’s take is that places like Michigan can have it both ways because these two notions of what attracts Millennials are not mutually exclusive. “But,” she added, “the real epiphany [is] this: My guess is that the more technically trained a young college graduate is, the more likely he or she will move to the job they really want. Liberal arts grads, meanwhile, without a specific niche or job training, will gravitate to seek the PLACE they want to live before they actually look for the job.”

As the father of three Millennials and as a part-time college professor who deals with a classroom full of them each semester, my view is a little skewed. What I keep hearing is that new grads and young workers just want solid jobs that pay decently. But that view may be skewed since I’m in Southern California and lifestyle isn’t the issue here that it may be in places like Michigan.

What do you think? Are Millennials overly focused on lifestyle instead of the job, or do you see something else going on? Either way, I’d love to get your view either with a comment here or an e-mail me at jhollon@workforce.com.

Employee engagement is one of those topics that’s great to talk about, but hard to put into practice. Kris Dunn does a pretty good job discussing it here and we’ve published tips on how to measure it, but does anyone really have a handle on how to leverage engagement as a smart business practice?

Here’s one possible way: Measure and compare employee engagement around the world in three different groups of workers —baby boomers, Generation X and Millennials (also known as Gen Y). Global consulting firm BlessingWhite did this with a survey conducted between December 2007 and February 2008 (you can get pieces of it here for free, but most of it will cost you), and it is pretty interesting. Here are the top-line results:

* There were too few survey responses for baby boomers in China to include.

The research suggests that the more senior the employees, the more engaged they are, BlessingWhite CEO Christopher Rice said in a press release on the results. “Around the globe, senior executives are generally more engaged than frontline managers or individual contributors. Gen Y [Millennial] disengagement levels may reflect, to some extent, their low seniority since more baby boomers would predictably hold leadership roles. Increased engagement is an expected outcome from power and position.”

Disengaged workers can be a big problem for companies, as we’ve reported here. There are certainly some strategies out there for how to keep workers better engaged, but as the BlessingWhite survey pointed out, maybe we need to look to India for some practical tips on how to do it.

That’s because the exception to a general picture of disengagement among Gen Y employees can be seen in India, where younger employees have higher levels of engagement compared with other regions, as Rice explained in the BlessingWhite press release. “This probably reflects the expanded opportunities as well as its young, fast-paced, knowledge-based economy. In fact, all generations in India are happier than employees in other regions.”

As I’ve written before, managers and executives need to work harder to bring Millennials into the fold and understand that they bring a lot healthier approach to work and the workplace than many older workers do.

We could look at this global engagement survey as a wake-up call to all managers. We need to do more to get the best out of Millennials. And while we’re at it, we can extend that thinking to everyone else in the workplace.