Which Employee Engagement Model Fits Your Problem? A Small Employer Guide

Pick the engagement model by the symptom you see. If the work is dull or unclear, use job design, the approach developed by Hackman and Oldham. If people are exhausted or stretched, use the job demands and resources model. If teams under different managers feel very different, run a short manager-level pulse and act on three items. One model, one pulse and three visible actions beats a survey nobody uses.

I am Mac Malbrough. I hold a J.D. and an MS-HRM, I am not an attorney, and I help small employers turn people data into action. Examples here are hypotheticals I made up to show the method. They are not client results.

Why do engagement efforts stall in small companies?

The usual story goes like this. Leadership senses that energy is low, so someone launches a survey. The results arrive as a pile of percentages. The team sees a slide about it, nothing changes and the next survey gets a lower response rate. The problem is rarely the survey. It is that nobody decided what problem the survey was meant to diagnose.

Engagement is a broad word. It can mean that people find the work meaningful, that they are not burned out, that they trust their manager or that they intend to stay. These are different problems with different fixes. A model is a way of naming which problem you have, so the action follows from it. This article compares three that research supports and shows how to choose.

What does job design explain?

In 1976 Hackman and Oldham published a model of how the design of a job affects motivation. They proposed five core job characteristics: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback from the work itself. In their model these shape three psychological states, including how meaningful the work feels and how responsible the person feels for results, which in turn relate to motivation and satisfaction.

Use this model when the symptom is “people do not care about the work.” The questions are practical:

• Can a person see a whole piece of work from start to finish, or only fragments?
• Do they know who the work helps?
• Do they have a say in how they do it?
• Do they learn how well it went without waiting for a review?

A hypothetical: a clinic’s front desk staff process intake forms all day and never hear whether patients got appointments. Adding a weekly report of outcomes, and letting staff own scheduling for one clinician, changes the job without changing pay. Nothing in this fix required a survey, only an honest look at how the job is built.

What does the job demands and resources model explain?

The job demands-resources model, developed by Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner and Schaufeli in a 2001 paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology, looks at two sides of work. Demands are aspects of the job that cost effort, such as workload and time pressure. Resources are aspects that help, such as support, autonomy and feedback. In their study of burnout, high demands were linked to exhaustion and a lack of resources was linked to disengagement.

Use this model when the symptom is “people are worn out.” The fix is to count both sides for each role and shift the balance, either by removing a demand or adding a resource. In a company of 30, for example, one operations lead handles every exception and every after-hours call. The remedy is not a wellness webinar. It is a second person trained on exceptions and a clear rule about when after-hours contact is expected. That removes a demand and adds a resource in one move.

One point of care: a resource that does not match the demand does not help. Offering a meditation app to someone who has the work of three people treats a design problem with a personal fix. Look at the job first.

What does a manager-level pulse add?

The first two models look at the job. The third looks at the manager, because the manager is how most employees experience the company. Gallup has reported that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in engagement scores across business units. That number comes from large samples, so it does not prove what is happening on your team, but it justifies asking the question by manager.

Use a short pulse when the symptom is “some teams are fine and others are not.” The Culture Pulse: 12 Questions is a printable team pulse with an Excel tally that charts results and a 30-minute debrief agenda. It checks whether your stated values show up in daily work, which makes it a good fit for small teams. If your values are vague, start with the Values to Behaviors Translator, which turns each value into things a person can see, reward and hire for.

With fewer than ten people on a team, report results to the team as a group and do not try to identify individual answers. The goal is a conversation, not a scorecard on each manager.

How do you choose among the three?

Match the model to the symptom and keep the first step small:

• Dull, unclear or meaningless work: start with job design on one role
• Exhaustion, overload or rising absence: map demands and resources for the most stretched role
• Uneven experience across teams: run the pulse once and compare
• Several of the above: pick the one that affects the most people and do it first

You do not have to build a framework. You have to decide which question you are asking. My article on how to show the return on employee engagement explains how to connect the answer to money, and using strengths at work covers one job design lever in more depth.

What happens after the results come in?

The step most companies skip is the one that makes people answer the next survey honestly. Turn the results into three actions with owners and dates, and tell people what you will do. The Survey Action Planner does exactly this: it takes the results, prioritizes three actions and produces a “You said, we did” message you can send to the team.

Three actions is a deliberate limit. A small company cannot fix twelve things at once, and a long list signals that nothing is a priority. Choose the three that affect the most people or the biggest risks and say what you are not doing yet and why. Then check progress at 30 and 90 days and report back, even if the report is “we have not finished.”

If the action is individual development, the professional development plan kit gives managers a structure for the conversation.

What are the risks of getting this wrong?

• Asking and not acting teaches people that feedback is wasted effort
• Reporting small groups can expose individuals, so keep a minimum group size and do not try to trace comments
• Using engagement scores as a performance rating for managers can lead to defensive behavior, so use them to start a conversation
• Do not promise changes you cannot make, such as pay increases, in the debrief

Can you combine the models?

Yes, but sequence them. A manager-level pulse is the quickest way to find where a problem sits, because it takes a few minutes per person and produces a result you can compare across teams. Once you know the team, use job design or demands and resources to find the cause in that team’s work. The mistake is to run all three at once across the whole company, which produces a stack of findings no one can act on. One model, one team, one change, then review.

Whichever model you choose, recognition is the easiest place to start, and I give a routine in a ten-minute weekly recognition routine.

What should you do this week?

Write down your symptom in one sentence and pick the model that fits it. If it is a manager-level problem, send the 12-question pulse to one team and hold the 30-minute debrief within a week of the results. If it is a job design or workload problem, sit down with the person doing the job and draw their demands and resources on one page.

The Culture Pulse and the Survey Action Planner work together as a pair. If you want help choosing and running the first round, book a free consult through my HR services for small businesses.

Related reading: why a great manager is a retention strategy.

Sources

• Hackman, J. R., and Oldham, G. R. (1976). “Motivation through the design of work: test of a theory.” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance. doi 10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7
• Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., and Schaufeli, W. B. (2001). “The job demands-resources model of burnout.” Journal of Applied Psychology. doi 10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.499
• Gallup Business Journal, “Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement,” April 21, 2015

McKinley holds a J.D. but is not a licensed attorney. Articles here are general information, not legal advice. For your specific situation, talk with an employment attorney.

Data current as of November 2026. Sources are linked where each figure appears.