My company does everything it can to not get direct input from employees. Need a new office layout? They don't ask employees but hire an outside company. Want to increase engagement? Don't ask employees but have some consultants at headquarters develop strategies. Want to improve project management? Hire outside consultants and don't get input from employees.
It's really weird. They do everything they can to make their employees into replaceable cogs without any input. My engagement would go up a lot if our input would be listened to. For example if my team proposes an office layout why not actually do it that way instead of doing something nobody wants? Or if projects are always late maybe ask the workers what they think the problem problem is and then fix these issues.
This is an ongoing issue in companies, and I think one reason is to shift the blame. What if they did ask the employees, and got either contradictory or terrible ideas? Who do you listen to? Either way someone is going to be upset and possibly feel more disenfranchised than before. If a 3rd party does it, they can just blame them.
Going through a 3rd party is the easy way out. We are highly paid engineers so I don't think our feedback would be that stupid especially if we were informed about other factors like cost. We spend our whole day weighing different trade-offs for our regular work so I think we could do this also for our work environment.
Re:The Employee Engagement Myth
by anoncoward111 on Sunday October 14, 2018 @01:40AM
(#18211550)
Typically the person who is deciding to bring in the outside consultants is getting a kickback, or might even have a direct stake in the consulting firm.
If they aren't, and they're just willingly spending company money on something they believe will work, then they're just another out of touch spreadsheet manager.
Mostly I agree with this. However, one time we did a work style evaluation thing, and it changed me from completely not understanding one of my co-workers to completely understanding and able to both help them and get help from them. So, it is sometimes, or at least once to my knowledge, to be worthwhile to do some of these kinds of things.
Its similar to the concept of forcing them to take personality and aptitude tests. It serves no purpose, and takes time and money. I remember having to sit through a meeting after taking one of these where the presenter explained the best way to approach members of different personality styles. My takeaway was that this is the real world and I am not going to prep to understand someones personality profile before every meeting or human interaction. No one at the manager level or above in the company as far as I am aware ever utilized it again. Lower level people tried but it had no positive results or changes to their career so they eventually abandoned it and worked for their C.O.L. increase. This is a 5k+ employee company.
Just treat your employees like real people who have lives and value them, best way to get employee engagement.