Engagement Is A Journey Not A Destination

Employee engagement remains a hot topic for many employers, from SMEs to corporate multi-nationals. However whilst everyone agrees employee engagement is key to an organisations success there still remains much disagreement about what engagement actually is and whether it can be measured. The basic problem here  is there simply is no definition of what employee engagement is and without that any attempt to measure it is akin to attempting to measure how "in love" someone is. It is just not possible, there is no scale as there is no definition. Now, despite this lack of definition, we all actually recognise engagement and disengagement when we see it. Whether you are in the corporate space or are a consumer in a supermarket dealing with a checkout operator. We know when they are engaged. Nothing is too much trouble, they understand us as a customer but actually all the time they are working in the best interests of their employer.  They have pride in their work and constantly strive to do better. This striving to do better is fundamentally where we need to be with a view to engagement. Positive engagement cannot be distilled down to a percentage that means anything of any scientific value, but the movement and change is something we can all readily recognise and by striving to positively affect this we can achieve massive benefits for our employers. So keeping with the "in love" analogy maybe it's time to stop trying to measure how "in love" someone is at this specific point in time and instead focus on are they becoming more or less in love in response to changes that the organisation makes in real-time.