Why Engagement is the Key to High Performance and Reaching Your Full Potential

We’re going through a historical transition in the workplace — remote work is taking hold, productivity and work-life balance are top of mind for employees, and companies are adopting new apps and processes overnight. There’s nothing traditional about today’s work environment, so why measure employee engagement using outdated, unproven, and siloed methods?

Leading researchers in organizational psychology have critiqued employee engagement measurement for a number of years, saying that it’s an old concept, with an unclear definition, unproven results, and administered through outdated practices and technology. The term “work engagement” was first published in academic journals by William Kahn in 1990. In the 2000s, for-profit organizations, including Gallup, CEB (now Gartner), and Towers Watson (now Willis Towers Watson), popularized the concept of employee engagement in the business world. However, there is little to no scientific evidence suggesting that these methods have a direct impact on improving performance. Yet costly, annual employee engagement surveys emerged as the de facto means to measure it. In the last decade, technology has made it possible for organizations of any size to send out employee engagement surveys, but this has only resulted in siloed systems of measurement and action.

Today’s business leaders want to understand what truly matters to their people and things impacting their performance, and they need instant insights and tools to act on their findings.

Your organization can only increase what you measure so make sure you measure what matters. Driven by 15Five’s Best-Self Management philosophy and backed by science, Courtney Bigony, MAPP, 15Five’s Director of People Science, and Jeff Smith, Ph.D., 15Five’s Director of Best-Self Academy, introduce a new and differentiated approach to engagement that measurably unlocks the potential of your workforce.