Dust off your archives and check out where you’ve been. There can be lost gold.
Over years it’s easy to forget even the really useful things. Then one day you rediscover them and wonder why they disappeared in the first place. Nowhere is this truer than in the corporate world.
New business trends and ideas easily swamp us, seemingly rendering older ideas obsolete. ‘Employee Engagement’ has been a big thing for businesses over the last 10 years. To go with that has been a head-spinning number of ‘models’. Just search ’employee engagement models’ and then click on images. There are hundreds of illustrations of employee engagement models and a quick scan can give a good idea of how diverse the models and language can be. That all points to an idea with some theoretical underpinnings. Some models will be well researched while others will be relying a lot on surface validity (it seems to make sense). However, for this post, it is about what gets forgotten and displaced in this emphasis. For me looking at the engagement literature reminded me of great work done in the 1970’s and 80’s on job design which gets very little or no explicit mention in any of the models. Even the term ‘job design’ sounds so last century … mechanistic, old-fashioned and too slow for this agile, divergent, disruptive, digital age. That is rubbish of course, every job has certain characteristics or a design if you prefer. Regardless, the topic of job design was swamped by four ideas that were believed to mediate motivated performance. 1. The belief that the nature of work was changing; 2. The opportunity for social contact; 3. The person’s actual skill levels and 4. Ambition. If you’re interested then read this 2010 article by Greg R. Oldham and J. Richard Hackman. )
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