Terms of Engagement

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations did a good job of keeping their employees informed and engaged. In fact, McKinsey suggested back in June of 2020 that employees were actually more engaged than before the pandemic hit. But as remote and distributed working models shift from a temporary response to a crisis to a permanent way of working for many organizations, so there needs to be a more conscious commitment to keeping those employees engaged and motivated, and to ensuring that they feel a real and meaningful part of the organization.

Google, as always, is full of advice, but much of it hasn’t changed in the last year since the focus was on maintaining engagement through disruption. And a lot of the advice is self-serving with a focus on technology-based collaboration solution providers recommending the use of technology-based collaboration solutions to keep people engaged! Go figure. I have no doubt that those tools help, but they aren’t the answer on their own.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of the online content on this topic is focused on maintaining engagement and motivation. That presupposes those employees were appropriately engaged in the first place, which I’m not sure is always the case; and that maintenance is all that it takes after nearly two years of new ways of working. That ignores the reality of staff turnover that has resulted in new …

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