# Workplace Surgery: Employee engagement vs. satisfaction - **Episode:** [136](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/136.md) (2024-10-15) - **Type:** workplace-surgery - **Tags:** employee-engagement, satisfaction, product-manager - **Time:** 41:33–45:32 (start 2493s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/136?t=2493](https://truthliesandwork.com/136?t=2493) --- [41:33] Al Elliott: Question number 2, Lee. I'm a product manager at a software development company, and I really do like my job and I love my team. However, our CEO has been talking a lot about improving employee engagement. They've used those sort of bunny ears, the inverted commas here recently, but I'm not entirely sure what this means and what the difference is between employee engagement and employee satisfaction. So that's the first thing I think this would be good for you to give us your thoughts on. I've always focused on keeping my team happy, campaigning for good salaries and fun perks, but apparently that's not enough anymore. This person's sounding a little bit jaded. The leadership team is considering Investing in some new engagement initiatives, but I'm skeptical. How is this different to what I'm already doing? [42:11] Leanne Elliott: I think the fact that you're asking the question probably means that there's, there's some learning to be done around employee engagement, because you also could potentially be right, um, in that there's lots of providers out there that will talk about employee engagement and provide employee engagement tools, and psychologists like me and others will look at it and go, That's not employee engagement. That's not measuring what you say it's measuring, and that has no useful application in the workplace whatsoever. There's a surprising amount of them out there and some incredibly popular. I won't name any names, but you'll have heard of them. In terms of the difference between— Can I name a name? No [42:49] Al Elliott: Can I suggest it might begin with a G? [42:50] Leanne Elliott: No [42:51] Al Elliott: Carry on [42:52] Leanne Elliott: So, in terms of the difference between employee engagement and employee satisfaction, Employee engagement is a phenomenon we observe in the workplace, um, which is basically meaning that if we create an environment that is positive, that then translates into positive thoughts and behaviors, and that then translates to positive individual and organizational performance. That entire process is employee engagement. Job satisfaction is a attitude or belief I might have as part of being an engaged employee that I find satisfaction in my job. But knowing if I'm satisfied is kind of like the what. It's like knowing if your customers are satisfied, or even better, knowing that your customers aren't happy, but you don't know why. It's not very useful data. You're going to have to go back and try and unpick that and figure out why they're not happy. So it's a similar thing, really. A a proper employee engagement tool that's backed by science and is predictive workplace behavior and performance, it's going to not only tell you how people are thinking and feeling and the impact that's having on performance, but why they're thinking and feeling in that way and what you can do about it, whether that be improving relationships, providing a clearer mission, more role clarity, less stress in the workplace. Um, and then you can push and pull, and you can feed that into your operational strategy, your people and culture strategy, your recruitment strategy, your well-being strategy. Um, it provides you all the data you need to, to basically run your business, the people aspect of your business, indefinitely. Um, so that is a difference, and that is why, um, your leadership team might be looking to, to implement it. And I think it's just time to get curious, um, because I think if, if you're leading these things, it sounds like you're passionate about them, it sounds like you're enthusiastic about you believe in them, you want to make sure that you're backing the right, the right tools, the right interventions are truly going to have the impact that, that you really want them to have. Um, so try and stay open-minded, try and stay curious, um, and see what, what these leaders have got in mind [45:01] Al Elliott: I love that. And you say that you're in software development. So what I, I really like, Leanne, what you said about the, um, the difference between employee engagement, employee, and job satisfaction. It's kind of like if you are building applications for people to use, bits of software people to use. You could say, how satisfied are you with the software? 8 out of 10. But then they only log in once a week. So they only use it when they have to use it. It's a different metric. So I think just take it and put it in the context of your world. See, and that should hopefully make things make sense a little bit more. Are you ready for question number 3, our final question?