The implications of this Forbes article are far ranging but from the standpoint of Employee Engagement the message is clear. Companies that ignore the need to interact with their employees on a higher level than was normal in decades past risk finding themselves the victim of destructive undercurrents at the hands of their own staff.
In an article I recently wrote for Occupational Health & Safety I detail the importance of employee engagement as a tactic towards improving safety. The entire article can be seen by clicking on This Link.
In the article I also cover the following topics:
The importance of employee engagement as it relates to safety is addressed in a brief article titled “Turn Apathy into Engagement” in the February 2011 issue of Industrial Safety & Hygiene News. The article succinctly calls out several of the connection points. I have pasted the best paragraph in the article below with the link to the full article below that.
“Most companies have been so focused on observations, targets, policies and lagging indicators such as OSHA recordable rates and lost-time metrics that they’ve lost a handle on the very safety culture that keeps productivity high and workers alive and healthy. The engagement process in safety and health is best accomplished through a serious culture improvement initiative and navigated through a safety culture management system.”
Periodically the engagement industry (also known as the incentive industry, motivation industry, premium industry, etc.) faces challenges from outside sources. These sources typically are academics/authors many of whom do a fair amount of public speaking to promote their work. While it would not be fair to make the blanket claim that their assertions are baseless it would be accurate in the vast majority of situations to say that those claims are at best misleading and at worst harmful.
Case in point, most recently Daniel Pink, author, public speaker and former Al Gore speech writer, made a presentation at a TED (Technology Entertainment Design) event in which he stated that motivational techniques:
He further stated that these findings were “fact” and then went on to cite some extremely random samples. I should mention that he confessed at the beginning of his presentation that he did terrible in law school, finishing at or near the bottom of his class. Based on his shoddy extrapolations and conclusions I can see why. I know that seminar speakers need to stir up their audiences to keep things lively, and telling business leaders that they have everything backwards is one way to accomplish this, but it is dangerous to present opinions as facts and then advise people how to run their businesses.
I’ll leave it there for now but will post specific challenges to his assertions in the near future. Below is the link to his presentation if you would like to see it for yourself. I am only supplying this link and commenting on this poor presentation because we in the engagement industry face these types of baseless challenges from time to time and it is important that collectively we are able to beat them down with substantive responses.