Promoting Parallel Monologues don’t make up employee engagement. A rich world of parallel monologues, don’t make even a poor employee engagement environment.
In many organizations, the conversational flow could be described as a multi-track of parallel monologues. Nobody is really seriously engaged in discussion or debate because everybody is launching his or her, often long, monologue.
‘The problem is that A and B are missing and C is out of place, in my opinion (IMO in short, so not to upset the delicate neuronal balance of the recipients). This is how I see it. This is my view’. The sentence might as well end as, ‘this is it, good bye’ but people don’t need to articulate this. They have checked out after the diagnostic line, just immediately after the full stop.
Multi-monologues don’t make a conversation.
Some Employee Engagement programmes focused on ‘Employee Voice’ miss the point completely. Voice is not engagement. Voice may be ventilation, articulation, opinion, rambling, catharsis, protest, perhaps ‘contribution’. All these are hardly engagement.
‘Giving voice’ is providing a pulpit, a psychiatrist’s couch, an easy concession.
Employee Voice is a trap that will delay the true engagement. Engagement is activism, actively participating, doing, fixing, collaborating.
Leaders: forget voice, aim at arms, legs, brain and fully functional human beings.
Employee Voice is an alibi for lazy Employee Engagement. Even if ‘you meet expectations’
(My local coffee shop meets expectations all the time: terrible coffee, insipid croissants and high price)