Employees are responsible for it, too

We talk about employee engagement. A lot. We measure it, predict it and help companies improve it. As a feedback and analytics company, people reach out to us to help them discover how they can improve business results by ensuring that employees are at optimal engagement.  Our experience has yielded a some key findings, including:

1. Companies deploy employee engagement surveys that often measure job satisfaction, not engagement.
2. Most Everyone -- from the marketplace to employees, managers and leaders in organizations -- assume that engagement is solely the company’s responsibility.

In this moment, we are forced to creatively manage our lives and businesses given the challenges of COVID-19. We’re doing more with less — less cost, less facetime, less clarity. For business leaders, it may appear that employees are grateful to be employed. But, does that mean they are engaged? 

Even prior to these conditions, business news regularly bombarded us with messaging that the U.S. workforce is disengaged. If you’re a part of an organization that conducts yearly engagement surveys, your analytics may also raise the question, what do we need to improve?

Leaders are making commitments to diversity. But, it’s managers’ actions that matter more than you may realize.

2020 has been a year of defining events that became worldwide shared experiences. While we collectively grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic and living within a patchwork of governmental advisories and work from home arrangements, we witnessed appalling injustices, including George Floyd’s tragic death. Those events sparked national protests which raised awareness of racial injustices.