August 2017
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Engagement Comes Down to Leadership

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Since Gallup began measuring levels of employee engagement back in 2000, there have been no significant changes to its rates—they’ve hovered around 33 percent for almost two decades now. Yet organizations spend tremendous amounts of money trying to boost their rates of engagement. Thousands of pages have been written on the topic, and self-proclaimed engagement experts have been offering cure-all solutions that rarely—if ever—work. However, not every engagement effort is an abject failure. Some companies have seen great successes in their rates of engagement through enacting successful engagement programs. So what makes some work and others fail? It comes down to two reasons. First, an employee engagement program needs to really be a management education and development initiative, not a measurement initiative. Most engagement efforts amount to nothing more than an annual survey that audits whether things are getting better. An actual engagement program will provide managers with the information and tools necessary to boost engagement in their teams. Second, organizations need to be selective about who they name as managers, particularly at the entry level. One of the main reasons for disengagement is dissatisfaction in leadership, so companies should invest heavily in the people who are already wired to be great managers, rather than invest in the training needed to make mediocre managers serviceable.

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