Moral Disengagement in Employee Engagement.
No problem. Employee engagement is not a problem to be solved. Let me say that again, employee engagement is not a problem to be solved. Engagement is each person’s experience to be lived it is not an anonymous PowerPoint presentation number to be referred to in executive presentations.
Engagement requires both a name and a face. One of the biggest problems created by employee engagement surveys is anonymity and the reduction of experience to a number. When we see experience as a number we can depersonalize it. Robust employee engagement requires both a name and a face and when it is not safe to put your name to your experience or for people to see your face we have the seeds of disengagement planted unintentionally in our approach to engagement.
Them is us. Employee engagement is an experience to be lived by all employees in the workplace from the CEO to the brand new hire. As I have stated before, one popular book referred to employees as “THEM.” Until we realize them is us we will not connect fully in an authentic way to create genuine and sustained engagement.
People are number one, all other numbers are just numbers. Moral disengagement occurs when we depersonalize our workplace and fail to create authentic and genuine connections with all who work with us. We do not want to raise employee engagement scores…we want to raise engagement and the score will merely reflect this increase in engagement. Let’s focus on all employees, not the people behind the numbers but the people who created the numbers.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. David founded and moderates the 2500+ member Employee Engagement Network. His personal website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and reached over 1,000,000 page views in under 4 months in 2010. David is involved in the application of Enterprise 2.0 approaches to engagement and the precursor, creating engaging approaches to communication, collaboration, and community within Enterprise 2.0.
Connect with David Zinger today for education, speaking, and coaching on engagement.
Email: dzinger@shaw.ca Phone 204 254 2130 Website: www.davidzinger.com
Always great posts David!
Love your line…
“Engagement is each person’s experience to be lived it is not an anonymous PowerPoint presentation number to be referred to in executive presentations.”
oh yes…and this one too:
“People are number one, all other numbers are just numbers”
Great Stuff!