The Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week

If your company is looking to make progress on employee engagement, you may want to get out your trowel, sharpen your clippers, and put on a sensible pair of boots because the garden may be where you should be looking for inspiration.

According to a recent article from Forbes, employee engagement scores really haven’t changed much in nearly 20 years, despite good intentions, increased investments, and a renewed focus spurred on by the pandemic. The problem, leadership strategist and author Dan Pontefract told Forbes, is that companies have been trying to evaluate the wrong thing and may have unrealistic expectations of what employee engagement even means.

“Dan’s premise,” writes Forbes, “is that humans grow the way a garden grows, with periods of blooming, budding, stuntedness, or renewal, and that the way leaders support employees and bring out their best is analogous to how a thoughtful gardener cares for — and benefits from — the garden.”

To learn more about when employees may need a little fertilizer or just to be left alone for the winter, be sure to dig into Forbes’s piece at the top of our list below of must-read articles for talent professionals. And further down our list, you can find out what’s next for chief diversity officers; why time to alignment may be your missing recruiting metric; and why a happily employed programmer took the time to fill out a whopping 250 job applications.