How do you know if your employees are engaged?

The only surefire way to really measure an individual’s “engagement” is to watch that person in action.

One of the big buzzwords in corporate communication is “engagement.”

Everybody is talking about it. Everybody has been talking about it, for a couple of years now. And I can see why. Long-suffering, underappreciated internal communicators are seduced by the idea that engagement is something you can actually measure and tie to communications.

If you survey your employees, the thinking goes, and find out their engagement scores are low, you can then do communication-type stuff to push those numbers up, right? Well … no. There are two problems with that line of thinking.

First, there’s the dirty little secret that communication consultants don’t like to admit when they speak at conferences on the topic: Namely, that true engagement has little to do with corporate communication. True engagement is driven by front-line supervisors and managers.

You know the old saying: People don’t quit companies, they quit bosses. You can work in a hellhole of an organization that never communicates with its employees … and if you have a terrific boss, you’ll stay there for life.

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