Employee engagement programs are confused with employee entertainment activities. Many organisations start and end up with entertainment activities without knowing the distinction with what a true engagement program that an employee would appreciate.
Here is my firsthand experience on the subject.
Two years back I was working in an IT organisation. The company had young employees who were in their mid-twenties. And like many companies in new age industries, the company wanted to keep the employees in good spirits.
The company had employee engagement activities. They usually were dance shows that allowed the employees to sweat out in corners in cafeteria demarcated for the purpose. Some employees, especially those who were young and new to the organization, enjoyed it. But many did not.
This is because the activities were physically engaging but not intellectually.
I was working with the quality team and we introduced ‘Kaizen’ as an employee engagement activity. Employees participated in the program with enthusiasm and interest. Thousands of ideas were posted by employees, each evaluated and hundreds were implemented. Suddenly there was a business improvement orientation all across the organization. Employees were happy – discussing and participating in the core purposes of the organisation.
It came out that a true employee engagement is one in which employees can contribute in the decision making processes of organisational management. Those that do not engage so, will merely be seen as employee entertainment designed to hoodwink young employees.
The sad thing is that activities such as ‘kaizen initiatives’ are not seen as functions of HR. It is left to ‘Quality’ or ‘TQM’ to champion such true employee engagement initiatives.
- Organisations should realize employee engagement is much more than employee entertainment
- HR should champion ‘kaizen’ and other process improvement initiatives.
I think what you discovered is that we are all different: some of us are happy with just some entertainment, others need a deeper involvement; the range of interests vary and it continually changes.One of the many new challenges for managers and HR is, it should be, to identify what makes their employees tick, provide that, while also trying to move everybody to wanting the deeper involvement as, indeed, it had been scientifically proven that this is what makes them engaged, productive, happy(er) - even if they don't know it yet.
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I think you have a great point. Many employees have families and friends outside of the organization and whereas the entertainment is fun, ideally it should also be advancing the skills of the team member and the success of the organization in a fun and entertaining way. Health related activities make a lot of sense as well as Kaizen. Good luck on brining change I think you are correct in your thesis that engagement is much more than entertainment.
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