Call me a cynic, but high employee-engagement scores alone do not equal open, creative, collaborative cultures. No question that engagement and collaboration are two sides of the same cultural coin when it comes to thriving business environments that progressive leaders want to empower and employees want to participate in, but high 1.0 engagement scores on their own don't cut it.

In a rich piece about how engagement affects collaboration, @jacobm puts it this way: "Employees may be 'happy,' but I think that effective collaboration is another variable that should be considered."

Check out the "workplace tradition" slide from a recent frank presentation.

It depicts some of the characteristics of a dictatorial organization. (Too strong? WorldBlu research states that 1 out of 4 Americans still believe they work in a dictatorship.)

Thing is, dictatorial isn't all bad: follow the rules and you get rewarded with comfy benefits, lush pension plans, sweet company perks and the soothing perception of stability. Work in an environment like that and you're damn right you're going to say, "Hell yes, I'm engaged!" when the survey comes around. Congrats: you've generated high 1.0 engagement scores.

But those attitudes and resulting types of siloed, stick-to-my-knitting, don't-rock-the-boat, entitled cultures won't last long in the marketplace. At their competitive heels are companies that shine from the inside out, succeeding with open, flat, fluid, fast, self-actualized people and cultures; 2.0 business collaboration at its best. We love to say they run "at the speed of trust."

Are they engaged? Definitely.  But it's not just about the bennies. It's really the inverse of that: it's about achieving success through personal accountability, confident collaboration and of course, leveraging new technologies to make it all sing.

The bottom-line business metric is always about "performance" of course, and Gallup says that in world-class organizations, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is about 9.5:1. In average organizations, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is about 1.8:1.

So yes, work on employee engagement. But do it for the right reasons: like authentically fueling an agile, 2.0 collaborative, individual mindset and long-term, collective success. 

@john4frank