Engagement, enactment, enrichment

I got asked for some ideas by an old friend the other day on the vexed question of employment engagement. As I thought through the issue it seemed to be that both the question and answer were pretty generic so I would blog the response. I’ll start by paraphrasing the problem definition.

We have a large international company, whose leadership are good at cost control but may be less well positioned to achieve growth. There is a perception that the leaders show little consideration for the needs of people providing poor quality working space. The employees feel there are not treated with dignity, are subject to an inhuman performance management regime and if they are consulted at all then they are consulted to late. Customer service is poor at best, catastrophic at worse; when customers have given up complaining you are in a bad way.

To make matters worse one of the large consultancies has now waded in with their engagement model and the promise of some recipes; its far from the first time this approach has been taken and it normally makes things worse. I was asked to suggest a well respected and robust model of engagement that would allow a bunch of analytically focused senior executives tackle employee engagement issues.

So, where do we go from here? Well that’s the teaser, I’ll post the response tomorrow.