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.”
These early adopters were the revolutionaries; by creating organizations that empowered work teams to make process improvements, redesign work, identify and solve quality problems, and set work schedules, they paved a path to superior business results, better labor-management relations, and improved quality of work life. Most large companies now recognize the performance benefits of engagement, and they want to develop it, too. I spent time with many of the pioneering companies either as a researcher trying to understand the inner workings of their team structure, or as a consultant helping to improve the performance of their work systems. An impressive list of companies participated in widespread employee engagement efforts going back to the 1980s and ‘90s: Boeing, Digital Equipment Corporation, Tektronix, Shell Canada, Lockheed, Harley-Davidson, Quaker Oats, IBM Canada, Esso, People Express, McDonnell-Douglas, and Kodak. Yet some of these companies either no longer exist or are a fraction of the size they were three decades ago. What happened? How can you have a highly innovative system of employee engagement — better than anything else around — and fail over the long haul? Based on what I observed, the answer is simple: bad strategy, poor integration, and the inability to transfer learning. These were the most common causes of engagement failure at the company level.
While strategic blunders, botched acquisitions, and the failure to apply lessons learned have contributed to some startling engagement failures, this occurs at the macro, company-wide level. What about the trip wires affecting engagement efforts within a single work team? What are the common traps that impact engagement in a small group (usually 5-15 members in size) and what can be done about it? Part II of this blog will provide some answers.
© 2015 by Rayner & Associates, Inc. Used by Overland Resource Group with permission.
Guest Blogger Steven R. Rayner is an author/co-author of seven books on topics related to high-performance work systems, change leadership, and culture change and is a leading consultant on these same topics. He is the founder of Rayner & Associates, Inc. Steve can be reached at: rayner@raynerassoc.com.