I'm heading off to New York today, for the big Ragan summit on Employee Engagement.

I'm really looking forward to it . . . because I want to see how many companies are really doing engagement well—meaning, getting the entire organization involved in it, from line supervisors to senior vice presidents; from HR to organizational development—and how many people are just sort of paying lip service to it.

I have a feeling that there's a lot of misconceptions surrounding engagement, and that a lot of organizations want to reap the benefit of an 'engaged' workforce—e.g., low turnover, higher productivity, better safety numbers, employees acting as ambassadors for the company, etc.—without doing the work.

And by the work, I mean two things:

1. The research. The only way engagement works is if you measure the levels of engagement and actively work to drive your numbers up.

2. Getting managers involved. So much of the whether or not employees feel engaged has to do with line supervisors, middle managers, and other people who have direct reports. Companies that do engagement well make those people responsible for communication. And that takes a lot of work, because you can't expect people to be responsible for communication unless you're willing to train them and help them do it, because it's not their area of expertise.

I just had a funny experience regarding engagement. I was meeting with this wonderful client last week. Great company culture, lots of people who truly cared about the organization, and a real interest in communication.

In fact, when they put the word out that a communications consultant (me) was coming in to talk about employee communication, 150 people signed up to listen. For an entire morning! Managers, non-managers, blue-collar workers, executives . . . they all signed up and stayed the whole time. And this was a completely voluntary meeting!

So it was a great day . . . and towards the end, about 30 of us—a good mix of communicators and non-communicators—were sitting around chewing the fat. It turns out that this organization had recently started using Gallup's Q12 engagement questions to survey employees.

If you're not familiar with them, Gallup has come up with 12 questions you can ask your workforce to see if they are 'engaged.' Questions like, 'Do you have a best friend at work?' and 'Do you know what is expected of you at work?'

People have to answer each question on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest or best score. In theory, then, those managers who get lower scores are expected to bring those numbers up—thereby guaranteeing that anyone who has direct reports is actively communicating with their employees. In theory.

Anyway, we were talking about the recent survey, and the director of communications asked the group:

'What did everyone think about the survey? What was the buzz.'

And this one woman—an administrative assistant—stood up and said:

'Just circle five to survive, baby! Mark five to survive. That's what I was told.'

Five to survive!! I love it! I asked her about it afterwards, and she said she was told that unless she wanted a lot of extra meetings and other extra work, she was better off just putting '5' down for everything, and then her department would be left alone.

Five to Survive. I wonder if the Gallup folks have ever heard that before.

Anyway, I'll be filing reports from the front lines over the next couple of days. Should be interesting.