ORG Blog

Part I explored the origins of employee engagement efforts, and identified some pioneering companies that enjoyed early successes. However, some early adopters of engagement practices have since shrunk or disappeared entirely. The first part identified three major causes of employee engagement failures at the organization-wide level – bad strategy, poor integration, and the inability to transfer learning. In Part II, we look at three fundamental sources of employee engagement failure at the work team level and suggest some remedies.

In today’s major corporations, you can hear terms such as “employee involvement,” “employee engagement,” and “high-performance teams” echoing through the hallways. Nearly every big company has some sort of engagement effort underway. This is in sharp contrast to 30 years ago, when I began my career. Back then, only a couple dozen prominent companies were experimenting in what was most often referred to as “participative management” or “socio-technical systems.”