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.
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.