Why is it harder to engage employee commitment across organisational boundaries?
One of the stickiest problems in organisations today is ‘How to influence communication and service provision across departmental boundaries so that employees in all departments are engaged with the organisation and each other to achieve high performance and results’. In many cases, we see pockets of very effective, results focused engagement within departments and business units and, at the same time, very poor relationships across boundaries with other departments or units. The end result is frequently a reduced overall business effectiveness and customer satisfaction as well as feelings of demoralisation amongst employees: A case of ‘what’s the point? Nothing will change’. This raises the question ‘If employees report that they are engaged with the company and their teams and managers, why do relationships across boundaries continue to suffer?’ For example, I recently observed an employee engagement score above 85% in a client company; an enviable result in anyone’s view. Neverthele
