Google “employee engagement” (I dare you) — several hundred thousand results will come back.   Now try “business innovation” — nearly two million hits!  Anyone seeking actionable suggestions about either has an awful lot to wade through.  Now try:  “employee engagement” “business innovation” —  less than five thousand hits, many coincidental (both terms happen to appear on the page, but they are not related).

That’s a bit surprising; I would have expected more talk about the connection between engagement and innovation.  After all, shouldn’t it be easier to get workforces fired up about doing something new, than about the same-old same-old?  And how does a company truly change anything important without a commitment to change born of passion?

This insight motivates our joint practice in organizational reinvigoration.  A lot of effort has recently been devoted to estimating the effects of employee engagement — on productivity, financial performance, workplace atmosphere, customer relations.  It shouldn’t be too controversial that organizations with engaged workforces tend to perform better on a variety of metrics.  But what is causing what?  Successful organizations tend to be happier places, and nothing engages people like success.

But there hasn’t been a lot of success around the business world lately; as the global economy feels around for a bottom, most business and nonprofit organizations are shrinking and/or strained.  It’s a lot less “engaging” than simply tough for five people to do the jobs of ten, even if the workload is somewhat reduced.  And how often is the workload really lower after layoffs, anyway?  Don’t we always face new demands?  To streamline processes, find cost savings, identify new market niches, develop new offerings?  All within constrained budgets?

Our approach to solving this chicken-and-egg problem is to combine processes by which employees are reengaged and new business models are developed — so that in place of discouraged, exhausted organizations you have “impassioned people with a plan.”

In this blog, we’ll post our own observations as well as links to interesting materials, hoping to build a community of interest in organizational reinvigoration.  We invite you to join us.