Redefining Engagement in a Post-Trust Era

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Kamaria Scott: I don't think layoffs in and of themselves are bad, but the how of how you do that is important. And if you've not invested in your people so they could, find another job, if you didn't do a compensation package as they left, then you've not taken care of those people and I can't trust my future to you.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We're on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you build happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. My name is David Rice. I am your host, as always. My guest today is Kamaria Scott. She is the founder and CEO of Enetic and the creator of the Manager Momentum Operating System.

We're gonna be talking about engagement, the psychological contract, and a whole lot more. This is the first installment of a two part conversation. Part two is gonna be over on Kamaria's show called the Manager-to-Manager podcast. So be sure to be on the lookout for that. I'll announce that later, but I will make sure we come back to that so you don't forget listener, but let's just get right into it.

Welcome! It's good to have you on the show.

Kamaria Scott: Oh, thank you. And I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

David Rice: Listeners, for context, we met recently at a conference called Running Remote and hit it off. And yeah, we wanna talk about management and some key issues going on right now, and this is where I want, I'm just gonna launch us right into it here.

Kamaria Scott: Yeah. Before you do that, I wanna add to your context, because, we did meet at Running Remote, but I think what was so cool is that we both focused on what it's like to lead people and how work is changing, right? Like I think our immediate connection was that running remote was a unique conference because it was focused on.

Kind of the anti of what we're seeing in the workplace right now, which is people being drug back to their offices is this wonderful, conference about, no let's stay free and get this work done.

David Rice: And I was like, I'm here for this, so.

Kamaria Scott: Neither are my people.

David Rice: Yeah. I was just like, wow, this, these voices I needed to find.

Yeah. But there's a lot of different topics that came up at the conference, right? And one of them was engagement. And everybody's worried about engagement, seeing engagement in productivity dips, from where, we were a couple years ago where I think right after the pandemic, like productivity was really high, right?

And now there's this fear that people are disengaging. And I kind of wanna start simple, but not really simple at all, right? With just a simple question, what is engagement, in your view? Like how has that definition drifted over time?

Kamaria Scott: Yes. Okay, so for people who don't know me, I am an I psychologist and so I am also a bit of a nerd.

And so when we think about the concept of employee engagement, it actually started off from a study done by David Kahan and he actually talked about workplace satisfaction. So it's really just the affinity that people have for the work and the workplace. So when people always say what is engagement?

I say it's the energy that you put towards something. But I also there've been several different definitions of engagement over time. Blessing White, used to call it the intersection of where the employee's needs are met. Where the organization's needs are met. So it's like that center place where there's a happy, high engaged, high productive people, but there's also a happy, high engaging workforce and they're getting what they need done.

There used to be another organization, I think it was, I can't remember the name, but they had a three layer model and they'd be like, engaged in what? Engaged in the work, engaged in the environment, engaged in the team. And I really loved that because it talked about the affinity to those three things.

The long and short of it is engagement is just the measurement of your affinity for your workplace and the work that you do.

David Rice: And as I came into HR, like I think that we were evolving towards that three-pronged, like how engaged are you with the sense of purpose, the team that you're on, the company itself and their mission.

And it's that is the most complicated and difficult to manage version of this idea.

Kamaria Scott: That's I loved that. I loved that version so much. I loved it because I think that you can be engaged in one and not the other, right? So I'm somebody who's always engaged in my work and sometimes I don't really care what the organization is doing.

As long as I have engaging work to do, I'm a happy camper. The thing that happens at the team level. That's the engagement that we really talk about. But that's, your day-to-day experience. Are you engaged with your team? And then it's are you engaged with a broader organization? And I find that most people are like meh when it comes to that.

So I think it's interesting 'cause it gives you some direction as to what you should be looking at if you're trying to fix something.

David Rice: Oh, I couldn't agree with that more. I can think of times where like I was, had tasked with say like leading a task force. And you're all super engaged and invested in that project, in that task, this like initiative that you think will move the needle.

But at the time, like you could look around at the rest of the business and a lot of us were like, it's just, it's all broken. I don't know.

Kamaria Scott: You like, I don't know about that. Whatever that is. Yeah. Whatever. I don't even wanna do over here. It's good.

David Rice: So when we were talking before this, we were talking a little bit about the psychological contract and how it's changed a little bit over the time.

Kamaria Scott: Yeah. See, this is why I like that we started off with kinda like the three prongs because when I think about like engagement at the organization level, I think psychological contract, because a lot of that engagement, a lot of what happens there is for me, the epitome of the psychological contract.

Right? That is really for those who aren't familiar, that's the relationship that the unspoken agreement that employees and employers have had with each other since we started having employees and employers. And I think it used to be that if I take care of you, if you as the employee take care of the company in your younger years, that the employer is gonna take care of you in your later years.

And so there was this kind of shared agreement that like we are, we're in this together, right? Maybe there's a give and take, but I'm gonna take care of you. You're gonna take care of me. We may both have to sacrifice a little bit, but we're gonna get there together.

David Rice: I think it's interesting 'cause like we found a lot of ways to break that contract.

We've, now we're seeing like the rise of a lot more gig workers, contract people, and I think about the long-term consequences of that. There's almost like this enthusiasm for it right now, which I don't understand. Like I do understand it, but from the organizational perspective, I almost don't understand it because while it may have advantages on saving you money in certain ways, they tend to cost more upfront and that trust never really gets built.

It's just very transactional, which is fine from the employee perspective. It's like, whatever, you know, because it's now I don't have to worry about your BS.

Kamaria Scott: So I think, and this is probably gonna be for me, the running theme 'cause it always is my running theme. It's intentionality, right?

Being really clear about what it is you wanna get out of this relationship, because you're absolutely right. I think of a lot of organizations and why they started talking about employee engagement and we started talking about employee engagement, right? And the original version of employee engagement had nothing to do with employee loyalty, right?

It had nothing to do with productivity. It was really measured with like kids at a summer camp and how much they enjoy their jobs. It was not what we turned it into and then we because let's sell things, manifested it into it's loyalty to the organization. And organizations love loyalty because if we're being honest, it leads to wage stagnation for employees.

I don't wanna pay market rate for you, so if I can bring you in and you can stay and I can give you 3% every year. I don't have to pay market rate for a new person. In that instance, I love it. But, and this is the important part of that, that also is the conversation or the context Before we had technology.

And so I think the important part of the conversation that people have to understand is that in the relationship between employers and employees and all of, there's only been two parties, right? It's like any game. Two teams are taken the field, right? But then now we're in a space of, there's a third party on the field.

And so if I can think about how I don't have to pay the cost or I can employ fewer people. I can do so at a shorter term cost. Then not only am I not paying, I might be paying market wage in terms of the cost. I'm not paying benefits. I'm not paying operating conversation. I'm not contributing to your 401k.

'cause remember, the relationship used to be I take care of you now. You take care of me later. I actually don't have to take care of you later because there's no 401k to vest. There is no pension anymore. It's just the cost of whatever I'm paying you right now. And that might be short term. So I think that is the transactional part of the gig work.

And time will tell if that's really what you want, because that other part of engagement we talked about, right? Engagement in the work is something that you have to make sure you're baking in with contractors. If I'm just doing a thing and I don't care, I have no connection to it, or you then are you gonna get my best work? Maybe. But you don't know that.

David Rice: There's another piece to this, right? For a long time, contractors was, it was enticing from the individual contributor perspective in the sense that in a lot of cases you got paid more really because you could charge based on, your services or whatever, you could essentially inflate the fee, right?

And now with the, you mentioned the technology piece and some of this stuff is getting automated or being valued slightly differently by companies. And so now that may end up getting diminished, your ability to charge a certain fee, maybe getting diminished, and then if that happens and you're not really invested in Wow.

The company does. I think that it may be less enticing for both sides to have that, that the evolution of that compensation structure. It's gonna be interesting, like for contractors and even even for employees, but that's a whole nother.

Kamaria Scott: So I think the question of all this is like, where are we going?

And one of the reasons I think why, like I always focus on intentionality is 'cause I hate ending up where I didn't wanna be, right? Like I hate, like how do we get here? This sucks. And I think I was reading an article yesterday about a company in China that has created a hotel cleaning robot. Oh yeah.

Okay. So it is meant for commercial use and I live in central Florida, so you know, I live in one of the hospitality capitals of the world, and my immediate thought was, my God. What's going to happen when organizations decide to buy these cleaning robots instead of humans? And so even part of the conversation that we're having now.

Like we're thinking about ai, but we're thinking about it 'cause it lives in the computer. We're not thinking about it out in the real world. So it's not just contracting gig workers, it's self-driving cars, it's robots that clean hotels. I think the bigger struggle is there a stopping point to automating or digitizing or robotizing our jobs?

Or will we continue to do it until there's nothing left? And is that really the embodiment of the psychological contract, which is we no longer care about each other, we don't care about human beings and their ability and their need to work.

David Rice: Yeah. So here's one of the things that as we were talking beforehand, this kinda came up.

We were talking about, some of these crises and everybody's coming to me and they're talking about trust. Right when we hold our events, there's questions about trust. So we just did one about reductions in force. Of course, this questions about trust. And it's one of the things that like, it's gonna get asked.

And there's been some events in the last two decades that have really. Impacted trust and one of them was I think the great recession. And I'm curious, in your opinion, how did that sort of impact trust expectations in the workplace? Was it a turning point in the engagement story?

Kamaria Scott: Oh absolutely. And this has always been really, I'll say a challenge for me, right? Because as an I psychologist, I literally went into. Style psychology because employee engagement is my jam. Like it has been what I do since I started working. And so when you start talking about engagement again, the outcome of that is loyalty to the organization.

It is, there is some roots to the psychological contract that we trust each other for these outcomes that we have to have. And I think when we hit the great recession, there was this sort of awakening that we weren't in the same relationship and that. All of the narratives that we had spawned to people were not true.

And I'll say this, like I, I always tell people I'm a layoff queen. I've been through three layoffs and my first one was during the great recession, and I was just beside myself because it was the first time that I, as a human being realized that. My performance didn't actually matter, right? So we tell people, if you're a high performer, high achiever, there's great things for you at the organization, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But then when it comes layoff, time performance is not in that conversation. It's a financial, we're cutting people, we're cutting things. You could have literally walked on water last year and you're still out the door, right? And so that relationship between what I think. I have control over and what I actually have control over.

It's not true. It's not real. And so then you start to break the trust that you're going to take care of me. So you told me to take care of you. I did that. I showed up. I was a five last year. And then you didn't really take care of me. And what's so interesting about the Great Recession is I will say, as have progressed, we've gotten better at laying people off back then.

Like you could be laid off with a month. Severance if that I lived in a space where people showed up to work one day and the doors are just locked.

All of those are flagrant and violations of the psychological contract because even if taking care of you doesn't mean take care of you now, it means even taking care of you is, as I offboard you, I don't think layoffs in and of themselves are bad.

I do think that companies shift and I think that there are times when you have to say we have a different strategy or we're gonna go a different direction. But the how of how you do that is important. If you've not invested in your people so they could, find another job. If you didn't do a compensation package as they left that said, Hey listen, we're gonna give you three months of severance so you could find another job, then you've not taken care of those people and I can't trust my future to you.

I coined this term that I called unreciprocated altruism, and what that means is that as an employee, you expect for me to sacrifice for you organization. I don't see that same sacrifice in return. And individual employees are asked to put the company's needs before their needs and trust that the employer is gonna make good on that sacrifice at some point.

And the Great Recession kind of signaled to people that's not the case.

David Rice: Yeah, absolutely. I, there was some crazy things that happened back then. I can remember one, one of my former colleagues found out that he had been let go when he went to Badge in and the badge didn't work anymore. Yes. I was like, you could've just let him stay home.

Like you could've called him something. He didn't turn in.

Kamaria Scott: People showing up to the front door and the front door was locked.

David Rice: Yeah.

Kamaria Scott: And these are real human individuals with real jobs, real lives, real children responsibilities that literally their paycheck stopped that day and they didn't know it.

And so I think that kind of behavior has become more common. The sort of treating employees as if they're not human, right? They're not real people, as if, and there's something in the language that we use, right? So when we started, I remember when we first started calling employees resources, I was working for a tech company and they're like, yeah, these resources.

And I was like, are we talking about people? What are we doing? These are humans. They're not resources. But when you start to use that centralized, neutral language. What ends up happening is that you start treating people as if they're not human people. Then it makes it easier when you are making these decisions, and again, I know organizations have to survive, but we have to remember that organizations are made up of humans.

David Rice: Well, and I think on a philosophical level, we need to realize that their value.

The organization exists because we as a species have the ability to work together. There's no thing in the animal kingdom where they have a sort of a business.

Kamaria Scott: And directors.

David Rice: Yeah. This doesn't really happen like that.

Kamaria Scott: There's still VP of sales in the lion.

David Rice: The only reason is we are capable of this as a species and we've constructed our society around it, but it only has value if it has value to people.

Outside of that, it's just an imagined thing. Like it's not a real entity, you can tear it down and no one dies,

Kamaria Scott: I wanna go back to the thing that you said about trust too, because it's funny, I'm writing a chapter on trust for an a TD leadership book. And one of the things that I was thinking about as I was formulating my chapter, because you start.

Doing this whole tried and true nonsense about, trust is inconsistency and it's in, are you competent as a leader, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the thing that really struck me as I was writing it was trust is trust in the outcome. There is certain people I trust you to be a terrible person because you've shown me over and over again consistently.

That's who you are. Yeah. So it's not like trust is this, like this sort of good neutral thing. And so the trust has to be, do I trust that you're going to do the right thing by me? And that has become the, for me, the overarching conversation. And not just with technology and ai, but when you're dragging people back to the office, are you doing that for me or are you doing that for you?

I trust that you're gonna do the right thing for me, means even if you have to lay me off, I trust that my separation will be something that's respectful and honors the commitment that I've had to this organization. My first layoff, I was like, oh, 30 days. Okay, that's a lot. But then like my second layoff, they were like, so it turns out you're gonna have six months of, separation pay and you're gonna give you like, you can still have your insurance.

I was like, almost like I too stepped out there. She was like, I have never seen someone. So like I was a girl. Listen, you have done right by me. I understand. Like people come, people go. What I'm not worried about right now is whether or not my child and I will be living under a bridge. So all is good in the world.

David Rice: Yeah.

Kamaria Scott: Yeah. So trust to me is directional, meaning can I trust? You are going to do what's right for me and for you, but I trust that you're gonna create a World War situation. Or should I be trusting that you're only gonna do what's right for you at my expense? And that's a que Then we don't ever talk about that.

When we talk about trust in leadership, you make it seem like it's a neutral thing, but it's not.

David Rice: The other thing that we don't talk about. And I think that. People are more inclined to want to trust if they feel like there's something worth engaging with in the organization. And this is one of the things, like we talk about engagement as a psych metric, right?

It's a feeling, it's a goal. It's a competitive advantage. It's a product. We've got a million different labels on it. It's everything to somebody. Are we actually offering people something that they want to be engaged with a lot of the time? And now what we're seeing with the tech coming in is like in some cases, no.

Kamaria Scott: It's always been, no,

I think tech is ified. It's no, seriously, and again, I feel like this is why, in a way, I love the work that I do because I use myself as a barometer. I know I'm a population of one, but I start with myself and then I extrapolate out to say is what I'm experiencing an anomaly to me or is what everybody else experiences as well?

And when I think about engagement, I always describe engagement as energy. There are nothing but floating balls of energy contained in bones and flesh, right? But it's energy and it's a finite amount. I have 100% of my energy because we think about like the principles of energy, right? You don't create or diminish it, it's just there and it just transforms.

And so the energy is like, where do I Engagement to me is where do I choose to put that energy? When I am super happy at work, you're getting more of my ball of energy. When you agitate my spirit, you get less of that ball of energy and I take it and I put it some other place. I put it on a personal project.

I put it into looking for a new job. I put it into everything else but your thing. And so the question is do you want my energy and are you making it worthwhile for me to point my energy at you knowing that if I point it at you, there's an opportunity cost of something else that I'm not pointing it at a.

David Rice: Hundred percent. Having been in jobs where I had to really question like, what is it that I'm doing? Yes. And like we talk all the time about how this younger generation, they want thing, they want that sense of purpose that they're, more socially conscious. And I think that's all true. But I also think that like, how the work gets done even is just, it's, we did that survey a while back about the show severance, just people's willingness to be the sort of like fervor with which they answered the question, would you sever your consciousness so that you don't remember work? Even in the comments on some of the things, like I, I put a video up on TikTok and one person was like, I'd do it for an extra 50 grand.

I don't care. I don't wanna remember any of it.

Kamaria Scott: No, because, and I so relate to that and here's why I relate to that. When again, I tell people I actually love my work. I have loved my work for most of my career and I think I might be an anomaly in that, but we always tell people, so one of the tenets of employee engagement right?

Is meaningful work. And if you go back to what that really meant, it was like they saw value in what they were doing and it really, they liked the impact they were having on the kids. And so what we turned that into corporate speak right, was like, tell people how what they do contributes to organizational success with love.

Nobody cares. Meaningful means meaningful to me. What do I find meaningful? And so when I think about, my career, what has always been meaningful to me has been my ability to help people reach their full potential, to create workplaces where people not only had the right skillsets to do their jobs, they had the right environments to do their jobs in.

It's always been my purpose. And so any organization that's Hey, friend. You wanna do these two things here? I'm a happy camper. If you let me do those two things, I'm even happier camper. And so somehow we have taken people's personal engagement and what they find interesting and what they find meaningful, what they find value in.

And we've turned that into, yeah, but what does that mean for the organization? Instead of going back to again, why I loved Blessing Whites follow the engagement. They acknowledged that it was an intersection let me let you do the thing that you love here. Let me find the alignment between what you love to do and what we need to get done.

And I think we've stopped doing that work to say this should always be a win-win situation. We should always be like, come Maria lights up when we let her create, when we give her space to be awesome when she has a project. Give that girl a project, let her go. We've stopped doing that. And what we did instead was we took work that used to be meaningful and used to be rich and we started making it task work, right?

So if you thinking about like work design, I'm an end-to-end girly. I want the whole project. But what we did with work design as we took work that was interesting and engaging and end to end, and we started being like, you are gonna do this piece of the work and then you're gonna do that piece of the work.

No one gets to see the end to end of what they're doing. How can they find it meaningful? Yeah, if I just said you're just gonna do this one part of the podcast, you're just gonna do the opening, then someone else is gonna come in, they're gonna do the middle part of the podcast and someone else is gonna close it out.

What part are you taking in the one piece that you're doing? Because you don't even see the big picture. But I'm supposed to tell you that what your meaning is important when all you wanna do is create a really great podcast 'cause you have a great vision for it.

David Rice: And then like the other thing that happens is you've got managers or like leaders who are like they can't see the big picture.

I say you won't let 'em, you won't. It's like analogy I gave somebody was like, imagine you were building a house and you were making it out a brick, right? But the only thing that you were allowed to do is mix the mortar. You wouldn't even know how to mix the mortar better if you didn't get to actually put it on any bricks.

Kamaria Scott: There you go. You would know the mortar was good. Why it sticks, what it needs to stick to, why it's too water.

David Rice: Maybe thicker, like you don't know because you're just like, just mixing this stuff and doing this thing, this very repetitive droney thing, and no one trusts you to do anything else. You're not gonna learn anything else. You're not gonna.

Kamaria Scott: The satisfaction in that. Exactly. Exactly. The satisfaction in that. I have always been somebody who like and one of the joys of being an I psychologist is that we have a very broad skillset. So I do all the things. I do selection, training, assessments, coaching, and I find joy in doing all the things, the roles that I have loved before.

If anybody knows me, they know. I always talk about one job that I loved, two pieces. It was my one dream job because they let me do all the things. They let me launch their first. Org wide engagement survey. I got to play in data. I got to go out and figure out the correlation between the employee engagement surveys and the guest satisfaction surveys.

What metrics Love them. I got to build a program to help our people leaders figure out how to drive engagement and how to use that engagement to bring our customer experience to life. There were so many things I got to do. There was new and novel experiences and it was the most amazing thing. And then over the years.

We started being like, no, you just do, I worked in another organization in a learning function, and it went from you're just a facilitator, or you're just a designer, or you're just a developer, or you're just a performance consultant instead of being able to own an end-to-end project.

And so if you can't own it end-to-end, and how do you see the big picture? How do you really understand the impact other than someone being like, David, your job is so important to us and to the organization and what we do here. We've lost the message somewhere. We've lost the plot line in this.

David Rice: So before we go, I wanna ask you something. And this is so you're gonna rewrite the psychological contract for today's workforce. This is the group of people that's seen a lot of layoffs, that's seen the freezes, the reorgs. So what would it say?

Kamaria Scott: Lemme clarify. Am I writing what it is today or am I writing what I think it should be?

David Rice: What you think it should be?

Kamaria Scott: I think the psychological contract should be what I think what I would always say the psychological contract should be. We are creating win-win scenarios for the both of us. We are finding out what it takes for you as an individual to thrive in your personal and professional life.

And we are aligning that to what we need to thrive as an organization. And we are together for as long as it makes sense. So no more of this. Longevity, nonsense. We all agree that's not a thing anymore, but we are gonna be in agreement and on the same playing field about how we treat each other, and so we're gonna have a shared expectation, meaning I am not gonna expect you to treat me like a spouse while I treat you like a not spouse.

If you could say side, chick side. That's what I said. Our rep I did you like a side chick? That's not what we're gonna do here. So either we're both gonna be side chicks to each other, or we're gonna be spouses to each other, but we're gonna be above board about what it is.

David Rice: Love it.

Before we go, two things I always do with every guest. The first is I wanna give you a chance to plug, anything you wanna plug. Tell people where they can find you, learn more about what you're doing.

Kamaria Scott: So you can find me, first and foremost, you can always find me where you find all the work peoples on LinkedIn.

Kamaria Scott. Please do connect with me there. I love people. I love chatting about the future of work, engagement, and I particularly love talking about managers because I think they are the glue to all of this. And so you can find me at managermomentum.com. We'll talk about how I support people leaders.

And you'll find us very soon. Be on the lookout if you're following me for the very first Manager-to-Manager Summit, where we're gonna talk about how we support people leaders in leading, engaged, healthy and high performing teams, and how we do that as a team sport with HR and senior leaders. So I look forward to seeing you all there soon.

More to come on that.

David Rice: Love it. Love it. Final thing, we do it on every episode. You can ask me any question you want. It could be related to what we've talked to you about today. Or it could be, I have one person ask me if I think aliens are real. Totally fine. So you pick.

Kamaria Scott: Ah, I would ask you, I'm curious do you think the robots are coming?

What do you think the end of the world looks like? Put on your dystopian future hat. Tell me what, where are we going?

David Rice: I do, but I also think this though. I just think that it's the catalyst to the next era of what it means to be human, and I don't necessarily think that ends up being bad. It will be bad in the beginning.

I think that because I don't trust the people who are managing the development of this technology, how it will be rolled out. They just, today they're trying to pass this so we're recording this in early June listeners, and they're just trying to pass the one big beautiful bill through Congress and inside that thing is a thing that says that no state or government body can make any AI regulation for 10 years.

Which is awful and I think will be very dam damaging because businesses who are creating this stuff will use it to do all kinds of things. If you look at the amount of money being dumped into something like Palantir, but this is all something that's out of our control. The one thing I would say is that people will come together.

There will be a moment where they crack in a way, but force some kind of change. I think that we may end up in a place where yeah, the robots are here. They do a lot, but we just have a different thing that we do now. We all think about it differently and we don't. Place as much meaning about work on your identity and maybe your social capital is measured differently in everything that you do.

And so like society isn't so constructed around work, it may not even be as constructed around money, like you said. And so I think that yeah, like we are in for the next 10 years, I think we're gonna see a radical change of some kind. I don't know what it is, this is just my theory, but I do think we'll see a radical change in which society is Yeah, goes through a major shift.

Some of it will be painful. Some of it will be good in the end. So just like anything else, like there'll be good and there'll be bad.

Kamaria Scott: Love it.

David Rice: Folks, be sure to join us for part two of this conversation over on Kamaria's podcast, it's the Manager-to-Manager podcast. We're gonna be continuing that and continuing this discussion. It's gonna evolve a little bit, but I hope you join us there.

If you haven't done so already, sign up for the People Managing People newsletter at peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe.

And until next time, don't freak out about the robots, we could just unplug them. This is our choosing.