Productivity vs. Engagement: What Matters Most in Professional Services?

Professional services firms talk a lot about productivity in the context of staff engagement. We often hear a lot of questions in the industry about what exactly is staff engagement, and what exactly is productivity? And more importantly, does one lead to another?

Staff Engagement

We often hear CEOs say what does ‘engaged’ staff member look like? Do they come to all the meetings? Do they do the most work? Do they create the most ideas? What is it?

Googling the answer, comes up with a definition somewhere between dedication, trust and commitment, however nobody seems to really have a set understanding. In the absence of a definition we reached out to thirty CEOs of professional services firms asking them the question of how they’d measure engagement. The feedback was unilateral - staff engagement is a demonstration by an employee that they are committed to helping organisation develop, irrespective of individual’s job title.

It is clear that if employees are committed to organisational development, they are likely to want to do everything possible to make sure the business succeeds, but is this the same thing as productivity?  We fear not – let’s find out why.

Productivity

Whilst engagement is measured as a slightly nebulous ‘commitment to organisational development’, in professional services firms productivity can be easily measured – it is fee earners’ time that produces revenue.  The higher the revenue, the higher the productivity.

From the above description you can start to see the missing link in a lot of organisations -- driving engagement in unlikely, on its own, to drive productivity. In fact, often as organisations try to do ‘engagement exercises’ fee earners try and learn about the wider business, with a view to help, which actually detracts from revenue generation.

Getting engagement to drive productivity

Engagement, without a doubt, is a positive thing for an organisation. Engaged teams do not happen by themselves, they require continuous effort.  This is where correctly structured gamification can help not only drive a warm an fuzzy feeling, but also productivity.

Additionally, engagement is self-reenforcing if timely feedback exists. People who are committed to the growth of the organiastion, need feedback that their effort is paying off. Lack of feedback, more often than not, leads to loss enthusiasm and ultimately disengagement.

Gamification can create such feedback. For example, making competitions around productivity targets, such as how many matters somebody closed, how much revenue they generated, or even how many customers (that would be unprofitable) they did not take on. Anything that can be measured, that is likely going to improve productivity.

Such targets are often rapped up onto team games, mascots, badges and so on. There are many staff gamification services, where one can define key parameters that you want to track, and they will give you gamification platforms that will create awards, and so on.