If you ask an expert on Employee Engagement what they can do on Monday morning to engage your employees they will bring the conversation round to what Employee Engagement means to them, without ever giving you a direct or useful answer to your question.

If you ask an expert on Employee Engagement what they can do on Monday morning to engage your employees they will bring the conversation round to what Employee Engagement means to them, without ever giving you a direct or useful answer to your question.

Many people understand that something is missing at work but have no idea exactly what it is or what to do to produce it.

Because there are a large number of people who genuinely want an Engaged workforce this has created an Engagement industry that appears to service their need.
The first thing they offer is an Engagement survey. Data is compiled and various loose and unimplementable recommendations are made. The next year the same survey is run again.
By now the workforce know what to expect so they are better at filling in the survey and their scores are better.
The company running the survey concludes that levels of engagement have risen and present a self-congratulatory report recommending that the organisation keep doing what they are doing, then do another survey next year.
The organisation has done nothing except get better at filling in the surveys so they start to get suspicious of this Engagement stuff.

The following year, the Emperor is still wearing the same suit, at some point someone will notice and ask, "How much have we spent on this Engagement stuff and what have we got for it?” The answers at this stage might be, “Quite a lot,” and “Nothing.”

That experience is not unusual. Trying to find someone who can tell us what to do on Monday morning to engage our workforce, what to do to sustain that engagement, how much the effort will cost and what sort of return we can see, those are the needles in the haystack.

On this planet there are probably less than five living people who could give us the information that we need to make our client look up and say "So that is what engagement is, now you have my attention."

Engagement is not new. It is just the latest word to describe something that managers have been searching for, for nearly a hundred years.

When somebody works for themselves they don't think about how long they work or the effort they put in. They are constantly looking for ways to get better at what they do, to reduce wastage or increase productivity. Managers, as one, thought, "Wow, if only I could bottle that and give it to all my employees my business would be unstoppable, I would call it hmm, "OWNERSHIP"

What a brilliant idea but ownership is an intangible, it is the way that people feel about something and nobody could figure out how to get it into a bottle, so people got fed up talking about it.
If I can’t buy it in a bottle to spray on my people I am not interested.

But the idea did not go away, so it came back with a different name.
Managers thought, what if instead of having to direct our employees in everything they do we could allow them take decisions for themselves, that would free up our time to manage the business, instead of the people.
If we could bottle this and feed it to our employees we could make a fortune, we will call it "EMPOWERMENT"
But once again nobody could figure out how to get empowerment into a bottle, so as a product it was not really commercial. But again, the idea would not go away.

Managers knew it was still out there. They knew that if they could figure out how to put it in a bottle to give to their employees it would make their performance phenomenal, and at the same time make them feel good about what they are doing. They knew that it was the same thing as ownership and empowerment but they also knew that nobody had been able to make those concepts work.
Once again they looked for another name to describe the same thing, believing that if they called it something else it would look as if it was something new. And it did.
This time they called it “ENGAGEMENT.”

And here we are again.
People have talked The Concept of Engagement to death, knowing that something fantastic is hanging just out of reach and no matter how far we stretch, there it will stay.
Now people are fed up hearing about it.
This is the third time that enlightened members of the management community have called Wolf.

Are we going to allow antediluvian Management practices to continue to prevent our workforces from achieving their potential?

That is certainly what it looks like.


Engagement is simple and it is cheap.
Producing the environment that will allow people to Engage is easy and inexpensive. The returns are measurable and accrue from day one.
The ROI is massive and the effort to produce it small.

But unless you can find someone who knows the above to be true your Engagement experience could still turn out to be an expensive waste of time.