Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

Over recent weeks I've become aware of increasing debate about the EE words for example Neil Morrison's 'Nobody wants to be engaged'. EE - not the bizarrely rebranded telecomms company but Employee Engagement. A simple term which I think most people get - employee engagement as opposed to customer engagement or audience engagement, engaging the internal audience rather than the external.

There are discussions about whether EE as a term is an obstacle to the message. Whether we can think of other things to call it. Is it happiness, wellbeing, wellness or what?

This seems like so much noise, just at a time when a groundswell is beginning to build in the wake of corporate scandals and with the support of the Engage for Success movement.  To me this is typical of so many movements in the past which end up tearing themselves apart over semantics, focussing inwards instead of outwards.

What are we doing? When there is still such a mountain to climb to convince boards to invest time, resources, intellectual capital and understanding in the need for EE why do we create a distracting sideshow that can only undermine our pitch? Someone, the unerring advocate of the importance of the inside culture Ian Buckingham I think, said "Angels on pinheads" about this the other day and I have to agree.

How can we expect people to take the important concept and its practitioners seriously when we resort to squabbling amongst ourselves?

Of course debate is healthy and should be encouraged but let’s focus it where it can achieve results – on
helping overcome the barriers, on helping people see that EE isn’t something you do to people or have done to you, that EE isn’t a tick box exercise, or a series of 'initiatives'. That EE isn't an outcome. It’s about building a healthy culture within an organisation where every employee (which means all those who take a salary from the organisation so leaders and managers too) is motivated to give of their best more often that they’re not; an environment where the people with the skills to leave choose to stay.

Surely it's far better to have a word which, ok may not be perfect but at least we all understand? A word to badge the concept and act as a shorthand for something we all need to grasp - quite simply organisations with high levels of employee engagement outperform organisations who don't on so many KPIs - net profit, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, productivity, innovation, employee turnover...

These KPIs are the important evidence we have to use to convince board level decision makers of the need to take this seriously - but you know, irrespective of these I know what kind of an organisation I'd rather work in.