What We Really Need is Employee Disengagement

Y’all, we’ve been talking about employee engagement — and the newfound, whatever-the-hell-difference-this-implies “employee experience” — for about 10 years now.

Broadly nothing has really happened. Engagement scores on major surveys haven’t really budged; sometimes they’ve gone down.

I don’t think we have a “crisis of engagement,” because typically the term “crisis” implies “Something that high-level people care about,” and in reality very few high-level people care about engagement. Work to the top dogs is about being in sixth gear, shipping product, and beating your rivals.

They know one definition of “engagement,” which is when they got down on one knee in front of a woman they hoped would ignore their 72-hour work weeks for the next three and a half decades. I jest… or do I?

Real talk/tea: the workplace is often closer to “shockingly inhumane” than “engaging” at a lot of companies. I worked for some real doozies of assholes in my day.