Thank you Paul McCartney MBA - My response to your highly emotive question above got longer and longer as I became deeply involved (engaged!) so, I decided to publish my thoughts as an essay and thank you for an interesting challenge nicely enjoyed!
Whilst there is no definitive answer to the conundrum I'll start predictably by exploring the definition of ‘engagement’ where I'm offered the following, ‘appointment, meeting, date, rendezvous, commitment, a formal agreement to get married’! Do any of those fit the proposition I wonder? The only one that remotely lands with me is ‘commitment’. Or is this what engagement means, or this?
Are we, for instance, to believe this from Mr. Branson?
"If the person who works at your company is not appreciated, they are not going to do things with a smile," Branson says. "By not treating employees well, companies risk losing customers over bad service. To this end, Branson says he has "made sure that Virgin prioritizes employees first, customers second, and shareholders third."
Why are we so afraid to get to know one another; why do we defer this relational issue to a mere process to be adhered to via a training agreement? Why aren't businesses doing the simple stuff like getting to know their people through human interaction? One answer could be because the company is simply too big to successfully achieve this or, another might be that certain departments are already over worked (or ‘lean’) and building a relationship just isn’t important in the grand scheme of things (as long as there isn’t too much budget or forecast slippage). An employee’s contract might also exclude them from feeling engaged. Mitigating these gaps may well come in the form of training courses under the guise of staff engagement and if that’s the only way to build relationships then perhaps little and often is better than nothing at all.
For me, this doesn't have to be complicated or even defer to what Gallup says (Gallup has to earn its money too!), if your company is bottom line driven then it cannot be about employee engagement; it can only ever be about delivering the bottom line. It is the responsibility of the employee to get serious about that and to manage their own expectations of how they think they are going to be viewed and valued by their employer. If the employee seeks a meaningful relationship in the workplace, I would ask whether it is better they seek out a smaller, more organic company who has the time to include the employee in their wider business family? If the company is bottom line driven it is going to go through re-org after re-org and, speaking from experience, this is the kiss of death in a workplace that has any semblance of relational interaction. Re-orgs create information vacuums which leave the workforce cut off from their bosses and rendered mute, as board after board come and go and policies change and never stop changing. If we ever needed a recipe for confusion and dereliction of duty, modern business has it in the bag.
Staying with the ‘keeping things simple’ motif, the simplest way a company (large or small) can ever hope to create some flow of engagement is to fulfill its responsibility as an employer. It can deliver the basics of employment via its own integrity. A mutually agreed career path, based on the employee’s AND employer's needs and ability to deliver, managed, monitored and owned by both parties, irrespective of who sits on the board and which policy is about to change. This commitment coupled with regular staff appraisals, would be a good start but all too often isn't being done in a meaningful way. More often than not the reality of the workplace is the ‘dead man’s shoes’ syndrome. This is deeply de-motivating to the workforce who end up in a working coma; barely functioning and definitely not engaged.
So for me, a bottom line driven organisation wishing to engage their workforce is a contradiction in terms. The two cannot co-exist because engagement depends upon long and meaningful relationships where people get to know, trust and rely upon one another. In a modern corporate world where the trend is ‘wham bam thank you ma’am’, meaningful relationships simply don’t exist and ultimately there is no vested interest from the workforce and henceforth little to no ‘engagement’.
For me, lack of engagement is just a symptom of a wider global problem to do with our excessive use of technology. As an experiment, try living without your 'tech' for one week (or even one day) and see what it does to your behaviour. Ooh, now there's a thought!
Cx