The Case For Engagement

A century ago we were putting the screws to the Industrial Revolution.  We revolutionized the revolution.

Growth and competitive advantages hinged largely on price.  Thus the pattern we followed to maintain these was a logical one.  We focused on the contributions that affected them and progressed from the easy solutions to the more difficult:

1. Work longer. Practices don’t change, you just do what you do for longer periods for the same pay.
2. Work smarter. A day only has so many hours so we created better ways of doing what we do.  Time and motion studies, the advent of the production line and mechanization.
3. Work cheaper. Move the job somewhere where the per capita income is 2-3% of what you’ve traditionally been paying.

But times are different today.  Many of us work with our heads rather than our hands.  The contributions we make can’t be compensated on a piece-rate basis nor can they be tangibly measured.  And yet, we’ve started following the same pattern yet again.

1. Work longer. Americans are now working an average of 46 hours per week, but I’d be willing to bet that anyone reading this works more than that.  Particularly given that you have your work literally at your fingertips (see below).
2. Work smarter. Email, smart phones, GTD practices and wikis.  We’ve started to squeeze more efficiency out of our days.
3. ???

photo by popoPsan

There are smart people all around the world.  What’s to prevent our knowledge jobs from also going overseas?

We need to think of more intelligent ways to optimize what we do.  But it’s no longer about ratcheting up the quantity of work.  Are we going to measure the number of PowerPoint slides or lines of code we write in a day?  We have to improve the quality of our contributions.

Think different.

The next step in improving our outputs: optimizing human relationships and fostering engagement.

Engagement is the new stopwatch.  Our knowledge businesses run on problem solving, creativity and innovation.  Three things that suffocate without engagement.  The softer side of who we hire, how we form and optimize teams and how we develop our personnel are the key.

I want to follow up on each in turn, but we have a lot of blind spots.  We have a lot of inertia propelling staid, unproductive practices.  The companies that win in the future will not only build great products cheaply but they will engage their employees and unleash the contributions in each to create, innovate and problem solve circles around their competitors.

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