I while ago I wrote that the ultimate form of Employee Engagement is a Company of Volunteers [1]. In a ‘company of volunteers’ you don’t talk much about employee engagement. You don’t have to.
My hypothesis is that companies that don’t talk about employee engagement fall under two categories. The ones that don’t care about it, and the ones that don’t need to talk about it.
So, I can now rephrase my original Daily Thought: The ultimate goal of Employee Engagement is to make the term redundant.
I am going to extend the same argument to ‘Change’. Companies that do change well, or embark upon a serious transformation, are often the ones that don’t talk much about ‘having a change management programme’. They just do it. ‘They’ are the programme. That some of them use our Viral Change Mobilizing Platform [2], is an honour for us. In that spirit, we don’t label a programme ‘Viral Change™’, but whatever A, or B, or C plans that the company has, ‘powered by Viral Change’
So, taking these two examples, the ultimate goal of Employee Engagement ( and there is a whole industry behind) is that we don’t need to talk about it. The ultimate goal of Change Management is that we create enough change-ability as a ‘way of life’ that we don’t need to talk about it. The ultimate goal of some management concepts is to get them to early retirement as soon as possible. That would be a sign of real progress. Retirement not because they are bad, but because there are not needed anymore.
I wrote before about retiring concepts in ‘Science advances by a series of funerals. And some management practices are not feeling very well’. [3] I am looking forward to Employee Engagement and Change Management having that deserved retirement, not necessarily a funeral.
I suspect they are not near close to it. But as organizational goals go, this is a good one.
You can see the collection of Thoughts on a specific topic by simply searching or clicking on the categories. Here is for example the mini collection on Employee Engagement [4]