I think it was Tom DeMarco who popularized this slogan (or a popular variant of it), but he has abandoned it in later years, even going on to give counterexamples. See http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep... .
If you actually want to increase genuine employee engagement then by all means do whatever it takes to make that happen even if it can't be measured.
What I've seen is that a lot of companies say they want in increase Employee Engagement when really what they're looking for is "We want our employees to be more productive and not quit".
Some jobs just won't be engaging or rewarding though. That's why we're paying them after-all though, right? :)
Most managers shouldn't be managers. If writing reports is your top priority you have failed miserably at your job, but will probably be promoted
There is definitely a cargo cult phenomenon going on here. For companies that value employee engagement and are willing to sacrifice other things for it, it's just not that hard. Companies that don't value it, but think it sounds progressive or enlightened or whatever, will do some official-looking things with the phrase "employee engagement" associated, but will mysteriously find it to be a thorny problem.
I worked for years in this space at my startup but we found success coming at it from a different angle. We started with a gamification platform and transitioned into enterprise integrations to measure "Employee Engagement". The difference was that we didn't just measure it through employee surveys but through objective goals on measurable KPIs. Essentially we hooked into live data sources from our customers and provided a way for managers to create leaderboards, achievements, goals, etc. against it.
Every time we renewed our contract with our customers we would measure and compare the performance of employees using the system against to those who were not and provide an ROI report. Most of our customers felt it was a no-brainer to renew once you could tie our costs to their increased revenue.
> "While measuring on a more frequent interval is a helpful start, the act of measuring doesn’t lead to improvement. It’s like if I step on a scale and expect to lose weight. If I couple the measurement with action, change can be made."
I think what it boils down to is "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.". It's very difficult to measure something nebulous such as Employee Engagement which is an intangible moving target.