Can you can create a workplace where people feel valued and motivated? Heather Bussing has 5-Links about Employee Engagement.

Engagement is not a goal. It’s a symptom. You can’t create engagement. You can create a workplace where people feel valued and that what they do matters.

Here are some takes on work Engagement.

Is Engagement a Near Miss Solution? by Paul Hebert

That idea of having an answer you think is right – or seems right because the tool used to do the calculation isn’t precise enough to get to the point where you either see the real answer – or the real error – sounds a lot like the whole issue of employee engagement.

We can measure a lot of the things that contribute to engagement. We can measure all around it but we can’t really measure “it” accurately because we don’t have a real definition and real set of criteria that have hard and fast measurement points.

Engagement: Lies, Damned Lies and WTF II by John Sumser

(T)he data on whether employees are engaged says that the answers are Yes, No and Sometimes. The differing pictures painted by each data set have a ‘through the looking glass’ feel to them.

Engagement Voodoo by John Sumser

There’s a lot of engagement snake oil being sold around our industry. While there is some interesting academic work that shows the possibility of broad based team synergies to turbocharge organizational performance, most engagement projects are designed to improve scores on employee satisfaction applied surveys. Most engagement projects are really fancy happiness pills.

Voodoo dolls are likely to produce better results.

In Defense of Employee Engagement by Jason Lauritsen

 The discussion about engagement gets muddy because people talk about it as if it’s a concrete, universally accepted norm of organizational measurement. It’s not. Engagement is a made-up construct, a label created by academics and consultants as a way to describe employee perceptions about the work environment. A single accepted definition of employee engagement doesn’t exist. Hence, a lot of confusion.

However, there’s a common thread underlying every description of engagement I’ve found.

Engagement: Lipstick for Pigs by Heather Bussing

If your employees are not engaged, you don’t have a happiness problem. You have a management problem.

Promoting happiness in a screwed up workplace is putting lipstick on the pig. You’ll just end up with a red snouted pig (when we would all much rather have bacon).

You’re also not paying attention to the issues that really need to be fixed.

These are the main things that make work suck and how to fix them.