Is employee engagement out of date?

Last week, Fast Company published an article that argued, "Employee engagement is out. Here’s a better metric."

It's a good article. The basic point isn't that there's anything wrong with employee engagement as such, but just that it's not a cure-all. By itself, employee engagement won't solve all your problems, any more than the perfect process or any other quick-and-easy panacea.

But surely that should have been obvious all along. Wasn't it? The fundamental point is that if you want good work — if you want Quality — then the people doing the work have to care about what they are doing. Only when you care about your work will it be any good. And the connection with employee engagement is a negative one: disengaged employees are a lot less likely to care about their work. So yes, if you want to see good work you should encourage employee engagement — but only as one tool among others, in order to remove one of the well-known obstacles to Quality. You can think of employee engagement as just one more of those techniques or gimmicks we talked about last week, along with preventive maintenance, calibration, and statistical process control. It is as if the whole corporate push for employee engagement over the past years had been the result of some massive, economy-wide Lessons Learned activity which identified employee disengagement as one more way that things can go wrong, and which therefore defined measures to prevent it.

In fact, the article then goes on to recommend "great work" as a better goal than employee engagement, and the definition of "great work" involves key behaviors that should look pretty familiar: continual improvement, Gemba walks, cross-functional problem-solving, Quality circles, and the other standard tools of the Quality trade. Specifically, the article says:

Here are the five key behaviors that employees who produce great work demonstrate:

• They ask the right questions, like “How might this task/process/problem be made easier/faster/safer/better?”
• They go and see, which may mean standing on an assembly line or watching users interact with a product.
• They talk to an outer circle, gathering information and insight from a broad array of experts.
• They improve the mix, continually fine-tuning and improving upon their work.
• They deliver the difference, remaining laser-focused on positive outcomes.

Don't these all sound familiar?

I'm not trying to criticize the article. Quite the contrary; I agree with it. My only point is that everything it reports is exactly what we should all have expected, because there are no silver bullets.

All the same, caring about what you do is remarkably powerful.