Are you fed up with being told over and over again about the benefits of employee engagement to your business? More importantly, are you totally confused about the fact that despite all the work being done on employee engagement, surveys are revealing that employee engagement remains at a low-level and productivity is still well below optimum levels?

Why the disconnect? Why is it that despite all of the money being poured into providing perks, promoting flexible working and having long and meaningful discussions with employees nothing seems to change? Perhaps the answer, quite simply, could be that we are asking the wrong questions!

You see, there is a certain inevitability to the way in which businesses look to adopt new approaches.

• Step one, either a business, or a business theorist, looks to find a solution to a particular problem in one organisation
• Step two, if the idea is successful then it is taken up and shared initially around the local area and then to an increasingly global audience
• Step three, the idea is dropped after increasing numbers of organisations unsuccessfully look to instil it in their own business, without taking the time to understand why it worked in one organisation in first place and what they need to do to adapt it for their own business

And this is the problem; my business is different to your business which is different to every other business. Even in two seemingly identical organisations the culture will be subtly different and the logical consequence is that it doesn’t matter how potentially game changing an idea is, unless time is taken to understand the fundamentals and adapt them for the individual organisation then the idea is likely to fail.

So when we copy pool tables and free lunches and company picnic days and the rest then in many cases we are simply treating employee engagement as a management theory rather than as a potential solution which will speak directly to the needs and potentials of our employees. So when I said above that we could be asking the wrong questions, perhaps what I should have said is that we are asking the wrong people.

If we want engaged employees then perhaps it should be our people who are driving the agenda. After all, I’m not going to be happy just because you tell me to be happy so why should I be engaged just because you tell me that you are doing a lot of work to build engagement. That’s one reason why self managed employee engagement programs are increasingly gaining traction; enabling people to set their own development agendas and to take a more proactive role in the way in which company culture translates into action.

In the dark days of winter we start to think of our resolutions for the year ahead, of the actions which we are going to take and of the ambitions which we’d like to see come to fruition. When it comes to employee engagement in 2016 perhaps it’s time to let go and to put engagement in the hands of the people who matter, the employees themselves.