I spend a decade as a management consultant and this was one of the things we helped clients with. You really hit the nail on the head with your analysis. Most disengaged employees are disengaged because of professional reasons (their work is unappreciated, not recognized, its not valuable, etc.) and not because they lack social interaction at work. These social committee blitzes can actually further dis-engage staff that are already on the fence or unhappy.

There is typically no one silver bullet for this but from my experience the answer typically requires better front line management. Your supervisors and department managers need to be spending more time with staff so that they a) better understand what staff do b) the challenges they face in doing it c) provide tons of positive and constructive feedback on the work. People want to know how they are doing and for others to recognize their efforts. Not just the big wins but the small daily victories as well.

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Remember - It's important to be comfortable in your own skin... because it turns out society frowns on wearing other people's

The lab tried that meeting after hours crap for a while. The same few people that got along in the lab went to the meeting, the rest skipped out. Then they tried to make it almost mandatory and the same few folks went.

They called it a great moral victory. It was crap, but management was soooo happy. no one else was, we would have preferred to see that money in our pockets.

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." Jimi Hendrix

So, you have dropping engagement, you asked what would help from the people and now you want to ignore what they said... That’s probably a good way to move more people into the disengaged category. IMO there is a critical mass on this stuff and you will push the needle further if you don’t let people know you are listening and have some action on what was brought up. Clearly communicate. Once people see actions they might take the survey more seriously next time and a few more might answer with less rah rah answers. But if you ignore what was brought up you very clearly will lose credibility in caring what the employees who bothered to answer your survey think.

I do think you should consider other routes as well- but blowing off the people who are engaged and took the time to answer your survey is probably not a good idea.

In my experience, most team events felt like managers were checking a box so they, and the company, could say they care about their employees. When managers truly cared about their employees more people wanted to attend the events because the offer felt genuine. Also, everyone has a home life, so spending more time away from home for free drinks wasn't very meaningful. Being told we're leaving work early and going to happy hour is much more fun. Lastly, I really appreciated it when management did things during the work day such as bringing in breakfast or lunch.

My new attitude is that no matter how silly the corporate silliness gets I refuse to pay attention to it. Every company of any size has almost identical stories. They all pretend to care about engagement, they all read the latest stupid book, and very very few of them actually care.

What makes most people engaged? Good hours, good pay, pleasant environment, time off, good benefits, talented managers. All of those cost money or are hard to come by. So instead we all have engagement meetings and team building.

Once you let that kind of stuff get under your skin it is all you can think about. There is a reason working for yourself is attractive to a lot of people.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.

My $0.02:

Some people like doing stuff with co-workers after hours for fun. Most don't.
Some people like free meals provided by the company to eat together and build engagement. Most don't.
Some people feel it's important to create a "family" feeling environment. Most don't.

Most (all?) people like employee engagement activities to be done *during* office ours. No one wants to spend more time away from their free time. If they want to spend time with coworkers on their free time - that's their choice.
Most people want to work in a positive team like atmosphere of encouragement, responsibility, ownership, autonomy, recognition and reward.

Finally, as someone already mentioned: good pay, good benefits, solid vacation/sick time policy, good hours, normal people... these are the most important things.

Comments appreciated. I don't think the "rah rah" types were the ones disengaged. That's part of the paradox. Wouldn't it be better to ask the disengaged folks to lead the teams and come up with recommendations to fix engagement? (But the survey's anonymous, so can't really do that). So, the recommendations on next steps are coming forth from highly engaged committee volunteers; And because management realizes we should do "something", we'll go with their recommendations and see some new events will roll out. But personally, I think more "forced fun" will miss the mark, and not be the right fix.

Also, the attention in the company on the survey results has been in the forefront since the beginning of the year, so the communication has been there. With various audiences, we've had town halls, highlights meetings, management meetings, and the survey stuff has been on the agenda at all of these. Also survey participation has been good, and no reason to doubt the candor and validity of responses.

It's the "what do we do about it next steps" is where I'm rolling my eyes a bit.

I'm with you on this. Currently, it feels like we're headed down a "check the box" move, and some additional forced fun for folks.

One of the things I do for my Directs (because I do care) is I tell them they can and should plan to take the day off on their bdays. Won't count against days taken off etc (which I don't track anyway). Instead of being in the office (unless they want to) sharing cupcakes in the galley, or going out to lunch with work colleagues - they should use that day anyway they like. Spend it with family, go on a long bike ride, putter in their garden, go on a day trip somewhere, etc. etc. And with advance notice, it's also easy for the team to work around the absence on that day. I've found this goes over really really well. And because they can plan ahead on this, folks have done some very cool and meaningful things to them. A small caring gesture on my part, high return for all). I've only had two instances where someones opted to come into work.

I think we have that. And if it were only that, it would feel like a place to simply clock-in/out...; I would add that work has to be valuable (to the company, and/or to self), and enjoyable (to self). Missing these drives down engagement.

Yes. When the bolded stuff happens organically, it's great. When forced by some "corp initiative" it won't. If I asked my boss for budget to launch free meals on site, I'm sure some would gripe that it's a way to keep folks onsite for more work :-)

As far as lists for what's important, for me it's "4 P's - Pay, People, Place, Product [i.e. what's produced out work])". When I rate the company I'm at on each of those dimensions, and the interactions between them, then I'm happy.

Back to the engagement thing, my 2cents is the company is forcing a misplaced focus on People issues, rather than Product [work] issues.

Having been through a lot of these and really not seeing anything change other than employees feel like their time and input is not valued and consultants get paid a lot-

I suggest you can the surveys and discussions and bring in breakfast the first Wednesday of every month with the money and time savings.

Back in the day my husband’s company had free bagels on Wed. He would wake up early dancing around the house singing about bagel day and go into work early and happy. This is a graduate degreed engineer. As an economist the ROI on those free bagels was amazing.

I take surveys all the time on if my job is rewarding. I never dance around in my underwear about them.

I think things like this matter. I spent the last 10 years at a fortune 500 software company and most managers sucked. A few managers would do similar things, like allowing us a to have a "free" day off for winning a competition or after a successful quarter end. It costs the company next to nothing and it meant a lot to the people on the team. In contrast, another manager I worked for questioned my overtime for Sunday flight done in order to make a Monday morning meeting. That meeting helped me turn a one year deal into a three year $21m deal and he still pushed back on 8 hours of overtime.

I've been through lots of these exercises in big corporations and smaller ones. This year, I asked each of our exec team menbers to meet with their teams and discuss two topics: 1) what did the company do well in 2018 and where do we need to improve; and 2) what big strategic ideas do they have for the future of the company.

As expected, the first question turned into a bit of a bitch session based on all the raw feedback, but everyone was engaged and participated. I selected the top few gripes and immediately implemented a few actions to address them in a positive manner. The reason to do so is that most of these exercises end up with either the employee feedback being ignored or the 'rah rah let's all spend more time together out of the office crap' (I personally hate that approach, having lived through a few).

I also took all of the input/feedback to our board of directors so they could get a view on life at the company. Of course, some if it reflected poorly on me but I think we all need to hear real feedback from time to time.

To me, the key is get ensure people feel engaged, listened to, and even if their ideas aren't addressed they know their voice has been heard. Most of these exercises are undertaken by 'academic' professionals and not the folks who get their hands dirty with products/customers. One little thing I've learned to do is when we hire a new team member, we send a nice gift basket to their family at home welcoming them. It's a small and inexpensive gesture but most people really appreciate it.

There was one time in the past where I was asked to run a company and I could see that the execs were all fighting with each other on virtually all topics. I thought it was mostly due to strategic misalignment so I took the whole exec team to a remote cabin for 3 days where we spend hours each day on strategy and the rest of the time eating, drinking, telling stories, and just getting to know one another. It worked so well that people to this day talk about it. Our Chairman was dead against it but then was the most vocal advocate afterwards.

That was a unique situation that I've not repeated in the years since but it was amazing when people humanized their peers and although there were always disagreements, the in-fighting stopped.

All that said, I'm no expert in employee relations and don't find it 'natural' for me as I usually push people pretty hard.

Don't we have the corporate buzzword thread somewhere?

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Gnothi Seauton.

Damn, I’m getting old. I sound like one of ‘them’. One major corp I worked for post acquisition of the startup I worked for had the entire exec team (about 250 people) fly into HQ for a week with Harvard Biz School leaders to do workshops on transformation, leadership, etc. I said the same thing about the buzzword-fest. I guess I retained more of it than I thought. ; )

I spent 25 years with a large retail corporation. Managing locations with up to 150 employees. I couldn’t take another day of shoveling out the corporate rah rah BS like you mentioned. I decided leave just over a year ago before it sucked all of the life out of me.