Want people to be engaged with their work? Make sure they know how to do it

This article was first published in the August edition of People Matters Perspectives.

We are taking it for granted that today, the lifespan of any new skill we learn is two years or less, and will soon become even shorter.

That we will barely have time to become proficient in a complex technical skill before it is obsolete and we have to start learning something new from scratch all over again.

Malcom Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory has been pretty well debunked for most professions, but it is a fact that proficiency or expertise - let alone mastery - takes time. A well-designed learning syllabus, a skilled trainer, or individual capability can shorten the process, but people still need practice to take that learning beyond basic level: to do the work more quickly and accurately, to more efficiently identify and correct errors, to see, understand, and implement new and more effective ways of doing something.

What's missing from most conversations around skills right now is the intersection between that effectiveness, and people's level of engagement with their work.

Capability contributes to engagement

The relationship between how hard or easy a person finds a task, and their level of engagement with a task, can generally be described by a bell curve. If it is impossible for the person to realistically perform, let alone do well, very few people will find any kind of satisfaction in the attempt no matter how they try to rationalise it.

On the other hand, as people gain the skills - or access to resources - that make them more effective at the task, and especially if they can observe their own improvement, their engagement levels will increase correspondingly. This is a subset of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory, the idea that when someone is carrying out an activity that matches their capabilities and has clear objectives and feedback, their engagement will peak.

This has implications for how engaged people can be when they are constantly having to learn and relearn, especially complex skills with short lifespans. There is a good chance that many people may only reach a limited level of proficiency in that skill before they have to set it aside and start learning afresh. In some cases, they may not even have time to progress beyond the basics before the skill becomes 'obsolete'.

What's wrong with never quite achieving proficiency?

Quite a lot of people are satisfied with not being proficient at what they do - as long as they interact mainly with people who have similarly low levels of proficiency. One 2022 study of learners found that if low-proficiency learners are paired with high-proficiency learners, both people are likely to become cognitively and socially disengaged.

In a workplace setting, this can translate to a few outcomes: most or all workers are not very effective at their tasks but they are engaged with the work, some are highly proficient and some are not proficient and they are disengaged when working together, or most are proficient and also engaged with the work.

Most employers are not going to be too happy with the first scenario, regardless of how engaged the workers are, and the second scenario will likely be the most common in workplaces around the world.

When employee engagement is a KPI for the HR function, though, closing that skill gap between proficient and less proficient workers takes on additional importance.

How do we reconcile the short lifespan of skills?

Skills with a short lifespan - and thereby a higher likelihood of obsolescence before people actually master them for work - tend to be overhyped. The much-vaunted ‘prompt engineer’ position, for example, quickly turned out to be overvalued. The solution here is simply to not be sucked onto the bandwagon.

Multiple studies have shown that much of the employee disengagement recorded in recent months comes from lack of knowledge about what actually is happening to their jobs, and lack of certainty around whether they will be able to continue doing their jobs - not just because they might be replaced by AI, but because they are not sure whether they can pick up the new skills required to do the job.

Some people do thrive on constant intensive change, and for them, reskilling and upskilling is hugely engaging. But for most, just being able to do their job with a reasonable level of proficiency and to retain stable employment in the process will keep most people considerably more engaged than the prospect of redundancy every six months as a new buzzword appears on the market.

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Did you find this article insightful? People Matters Perspectives is the official LinkedIn newsletter of People Matters, bringing you exclusive insights from the People and Work space across four regions and more. Read the previous editions here, and keep an eye out for the upcoming August edition rolling-out soon.