The quest for employee engagement often struggles to be on the corporate or political agenda. It sounds ‘soft’ both from a finance-based business perspective, and to trade unionists who emphasize legal rights. ‘Engagement’, however, isn’t soft: and it isn’t only about rights and employee welfare – it’s about performance, too, based on the inter-dependence on which all organizations depend.
What is frustrating is the common practice of paying lip-service to engagement and enlightened leadership, only to revert to type when discussing strategy or politics. In these realms, using accountancy-based economic models, engagement isn’t just discounted, it’s treated as a negative. We discussed last week how the wage cost is not the employment cost, but it is remarkable how often this gets forgotten.
Many people sort of ‘get’ that engagement matters, but baulk at the implications. In the real world, it matters all the time: not just in teams but in strategy; not just on training courses but in project management. The organization consists of people, not ‘resources’.
From New Normal, Radical Shift:
“Most do not yet possess the ideology or the vocabulary to describe and encourage the economics of inter-dependence; for example by not adopting human capital analysis which, where used, shows the huge business returns of high levels of employee engagement and promising careers for staff.”
Buy the book: http://tinyurl.com/mp8w4lg
For Neela’s blog, go to: http://www.neelabettridge.com/category/blog/
Join the Linked-in group Radical Shift: http://tinyurl.com/nbmg754
If you are interested in learning more about training courses linked to these themes, or to invite Neela or Philip to give a talk on any of these subjects, please contact us on:
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