> You start as someone dedicated to a craft, you end up working somewhere that pays you a lot of money to do it but without giving you the chance to put yourself into that work at all, and then you end up making soulless work that not even you really like. But it made money so it keeps going like that until it absolutely blows up and everyone has to "rebrand" or another company slips in as the rebranded form in your place.
This is the best summary of what matches my experience in this industry that I've seen. Favouriting.
Based on what I read about it, I agree that the way "employee engagement" is pursued is missing the point. Especially that companies typically also optimize for having employees be replaceable cogs. I don't think you can have both. Engagement comes from aligned goals, autonomy, and coworkers you can relate with. Which is opposite of what you want to have when you're building a machine, where employees are dumb parts.
There's a great book about this called Seeing Like a State. It's about the conflict between top-down planning and bottom-up development of complex systems - things like cities and forests.
One of the big points is that leaders tend to be obsessed with making the system legible to themselves, often at great cost to the effectiveness of the system itself. There's a sense that "if I can't easily model/perceive it in my head, it doesn't exist or it's worthless". Of course the reality is that the majority of what goes on in a complex system is invisible to any outsider; the system is more complex than the brain trying to model it. So management efforts that ignore or even try to reduce that illegible complexity end up destroying much of the system they're attempting to manage.
I think there's also a simpler explanation: It's unintentional gamification. People like dopamine hits they get from rising numbers, rectilinear grids, clean charts and projections. So they pursue these things as an end goal, imagining somehow that this is the same as pursuing success. Of course a really well-working complex system (like a company or city or forest) is too complex to model with such tools. But the manager isn't playing to make a good complex system, he's playing a little game of graphs on his computer screen. The chart went up and to the right - you win today!
To be honest I don't think the typical corporate strategy is irrational, either, because employees can be wrong about product and business decisions in exactly the same way that executives can be, and, ultimately, the construct of the corporation exists specifically so a pursuit can outlive any contributor to it. Endless discussion and fretting over every single thing hinders productivity, also.
But why am I supposed to feel good about being part of that system? And who decided that was the best we could possibly do?
19 years out from the release of Black On Both Sides and still all anyone wants is to tell me to try to have some fret in my heart behind the things that they do. I mean, I guess...
This is the best summary of what matches my experience in this industry that I've seen. Favouriting.
Based on what I read about it, I agree that the way "employee engagement" is pursued is missing the point. Especially that companies typically also optimize for having employees be replaceable cogs. I don't think you can have both. Engagement comes from aligned goals, autonomy, and coworkers you can relate with. Which is opposite of what you want to have when you're building a machine, where employees are dumb parts.