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The Engagement Revolution: Transforming Workplaces Through Human Connection
In a world where only 30% of employees feel engaged at work, Glenn Elliott's "Build It" offers a radical yet practical blueprint for creating thriving workplace cultures. This isn't just another business book-it's the culmination of Elliott's journey from disengaged employee to founder of Reward Gateway, where he pioneered approaches that would later help hundreds of companies transform their cultures. The book has become required reading at companies like LinkedIn and American Express, with Richard Branson calling it "essential for any leader wanting to engage their team." What makes this work particularly powerful is its rejection of quick fixes in favor of fundamental cultural transformation-something increasingly critical as technology accelerates business cycles and companies with disengaged workforces find themselves unable to adapt quickly enough to survive.
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The Engagement BridgeTM: A Framework for Workplace Transformation
The foundation of Elliott's approach is the Engagement BridgeTM-a comprehensive model showing how ten interconnected elements work together to create truly engaged workplaces. Unlike traditional approaches that focus on superficial perks or isolated initiatives, the Bridge recognizes that engagement emerges from the collective impact of multiple elements working in harmony.
At its foundation sits Open & Honest Communication, which builds the trust necessary for all other elements to function. Purpose, Mission & Values provide direction and meaning beyond profit. Leadership and Management work in tandem to ensure authenticity between what the company says and what it actually does. Job Design, Learning, and Recognition form interconnected elements that create meaningful, developing roles. Finally, the underpinning elements-Pay & Benefits, Workspace, and Wellbeing-provide stable ground, though they alone cannot create engagement.
What's revolutionary about this approach is the recognition that company culture isn't a separate element but rather the output of the Bridge itself. Culture emerges from the collective actions taken across all elements-how the company recruits, makes decisions, operates, and how its leaders and managers behave. Everything on the Bridge represents controllable inputs that organizations can invest in to improve connection with employees.
The model acknowledges that engagement isn't binary but exists on a spectrum, with even modest improvements creating competitive advantage. Most importantly, it demonstrates that meaningful engagement doesn't require massive resources-companies of all sizes and budgets can implement effective strategies by focusing on the elements that will make the greatest impact for their specific workforce.
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Open & Honest Communication: The Foundation of Trust
At the heart of employee disengagement lies a fundamental lack of trust, stemming from persistent workplace dishonesty that begins with interview misrepresentations and continues through "professional" behaviors that mask authenticity. The Edelman Trust Barometer reveals a troubling pattern: trust in organizations decreases down the hierarchy, with 64% of executives trusting their companies compared to just 48% of rank-and-file employees.
This trust deficit creates a structural challenge: power resides at the top while information sits at the bottom. Sidney Yoshida's "Iceberg of Ignorance" study found that top management knows only 4% of front-line problems, while employees know 100%. Yet few leaders make sufficient effort to build cultures of open communication where this vital information can flow freely.
Organizations with strong communication cultures achieve three key benefits: improved trust between colleagues and leadership, better alignment to goals with staff understanding company strategy deeply enough to inform daily decisions, and lower-risk decision-making through open debate and diverse perspectives. Rebel companies achieve this through five behaviors: defaulting to transparency unless absolutely necessary, explaining the "why" behind decisions before the "how," making room for dissent and diverse opinions, communicating continuously with warmth and emotion, and investing in lateral transparency between peers and departments.
Buffer exemplifies this approach through their radical transparency, publicly sharing all employee salaries on their website along with their pricing model, revenues, equity grants and company expenses. This stems from their value of "default to transparency," which CEO Joel Gascoigne explains builds trust-"the foundation of great teamwork." The benefits have been significant: job applications increased 50%, candidates can quickly assess cultural fit, and the approach helps eliminate pay inequalities by removing places to hide discrepancies.
Similarly, when Australian car manufacturer Holden learned its plant would close in four years, leadership made the remarkable decision to ramp up employee engagement rather than wind down. Their comprehensive approach included immediate transparent communication about the closure, improved employee experience through facility upgrades and company events, daily leadership production walks to stay connected with employees, and a three-phase transition support program helping employees prepare for their next career steps. The results were extraordinary: workplace metrics increased 20-30%, attendance improved, processes were enhanced, and car quality reached world-class standards.
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Purpose, Mission & Values: Creating Meaningful Connection
While communication provides a foundation for engagement, Purpose, Mission & Values (PMV) gives culture both direction and methodology. These elements work together to create alignment and meaning: Mission defines what goal your organization is committed to, Purpose explains why that goal matters and who benefits, and Values codify how your company will behave to achieve it.
A well-articulated mission gives employees something meaningful to work toward, helps customers connect more deeply with the organization, and supports long-term decision-making. Research shows that employees who believe their work has purpose cope better with stress and avoid burnout. Values, when properly implemented, guide behavior and decision-making throughout the organization.
Successfully implementing values requires living them through everyday actions. Companies must recruit, reward, and promote against their values to avoid inauthenticity. As Netflix demonstrates through their evolution from 9 to 10 values as the company transformed from DVD mailing to global streaming platform, values must align with business strategy and workforce needs.
G Adventures exemplifies this approach through their five simple values (Love, Lead, Embrace, Create, Do) that transcend cultures and are easy to understand for all employees, "whether you were a cook on a truck in Africa or a horse stableman in Mongolia." They bring these values to life through an annual company-wide values-based video competition where employees make short movies about what the values mean to them. More importantly, they use values to guide business decisions, exemplified when they revolutionized their deposit policy after employees pointed out that keeping customer deposits for canceled trips went against "doing the right thing." They created a lifetime deposit system instead, demonstrating their values in action.
CarTrawler shows how values can evolve as companies grow. When transitioning from "infant to teenager," they launched five new values under the apt acronym HOPES: Humility (replacing Irreverence), Ownership (emphasizing accountability), Passion for improvement (replacing Restless Satisfaction), Enthusiasm (maintaining the startup energy), and Smart Collaboration (evolving from simple collaboration to encourage autonomy). This evolution balanced what made the company special at its start with what would support continued growth.
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Leadership: From Command and Control to Consent
Leadership is fundamentally changing as technology democratizes power. Today's leaders face the dual risk of being fired by bosses or rejected by staff, as employees gain voice through platforms like Glassdoor. With 41 million monthly visitors to Glassdoor and 80% of candidates reading reviews before applying, leaders now operate in a transparent environment where their actions are constantly evaluated.
We're moving from command and control to "leadership by consent" as employees demand visible, accountable leadership. Companies like Google are redistributing power away from individual managers, while employees increasingly expect leaders to add demonstrable value. A study of 350 millennials revealed they want leaders who own their mistakes, act as positive human role models, and demonstrate value through coaching and resource management.
The CEO's primary job is delivering business results by creating an environment where employees can and want to do their best work. Every hour spent on engagement conditions is an investment in workforce productivity. Rebel CEOs use every tool available to connect directly with employees, treating staff as key stakeholders alongside customers.
VaynerMedia demonstrates this approach through their Chief Heart Officer Claude Silver, who created one-on-one "whiteboard sessions" to help employees discover their personal mission statements. These coaching sessions include probing questions like "Why does your team feel you're valuable?" and "When you're standing in front of the mirror brushing your teeth, who are you?" This approach has contributed to low attrition rates by meeting millennials' needs for growth opportunities and helping them find their path, voice, and whole self.
St John Ambulance shows how consultative leadership can transform decision-making. Their rebellious approach involved holding functional and regional workshops with clear objectives but without prescribed solutions. Instead of presenting employees with pre-determined options, they started with a "clean sheet of paper" within defined parameters. This approach yielded better business decisions by leveraging front-line expertise, such as when creating admin hubs where employee input significantly changed the design and location plans.
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Management: Where Values Meet Reality
While leadership represents what an organization says it will do, management reflects what it actually does. In all but the smallest organizations, critical decisions about hiring, firing, promotion, and development are made by managers, guided by HR policies. These actions can either support or damage engagement, and for most companies, they're damaging it. The disconnect between stated values and actual management practices creates an authenticity problem that undermines trust and engagement.
Companies often make grand statements about their culture while maintaining procedures that contradict these claims. At Reward Gateway, Glenn discovered their US employment contract completely contradicted their "Be Human" value, with harsh terms about non-compete clauses, minimal severance pay, probationary periods for benefits, and invasive email monitoring policies. After feeling ashamed, he personally rewrote the contract, removing one-sided protections and apologized to every US hire, signing new contracts with the team.
The "myth of the permanent job" underlies much management malpractice. While companies can't offer lifetime employment, would anyone truly want it? Being locked into one role despite changing needs contradicts our desire for meaningful work. The truth is permanent jobs don't exist-they merely provide an illusion of security. People should do jobs as long as they love them, the job loves them, and customers need the work done.
Rebel companies create alignment through all management levels by: writing policies for the trustworthy majority rather than the problematic few; aligning HR practices with values; establishing adult, equal relationships with employees; ignoring established HR "best practices" when they don't serve goals (like abandoning traditional performance reviews); and managing legal counsel carefully to balance protection with positive culture.
Zappos exemplifies this approach by offering new hires a month's salary to leave if they don't embrace the company culture. This unusual approach ensures employees aren't "stuck" in a poor cultural fit just because they need money. Only 2% of new hires take the money and leave, thanks to Zappos' comprehensive cultural screening process.
Gap Inc. demonstrates how abandoning traditional performance management can improve results. Their new performance management process, "GPS" (Grow. Perform. Succeed.), replaces traditional reviews with five components: Performance standards instead of ratings; outcome-focused goals limited to eight maximum; twelve informal "touch points" throughout the year replacing annual reviews; simplified rewards allocation without forced distribution curves; and learning modules to support the new process. This approach has delivered exceptional results, improving HR metrics while saving time for managers and employees.
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Job Design: Creating Meaningful, Engaging Work
Most jobs aren't designed at all-merely lists of loosely connected tasks with little consideration for how the person doing them will feel. The result: boring, repetitive jobs where people can't tell if they've had a good or bad day. The attributes of good jobs aren't complex-people need to deploy skills, produce meaningful work, have enough challenge, and possess sufficient autonomy not to feel like part of a machine.
Traditional office setups with fixed desks are becoming obsolete as work becomes more varied. To design high-engagement jobs, we must consider both how demanding a job is and how much control the person has. The sweet spot is demanding, challenging work combined with high degrees of autonomy-these are the jobs people love. We can improve job design by building in more freedom, allowing employees to own visible outcomes, and creating room for roles to develop as skills grow.
Job design goes to the heart of organizational culture, requiring trust over approval and freedom over process. Leaders must accept the occasional missteps that come with autonomy rather than restricting freedom when something goes wrong. Rebels design roles with several key characteristics: freedom to fail and develop; accountability and visibility of results; alignment with the company mission; focused, nimble teams (Jeff Bezos's "two-pizza rule" limits teams to 6-7 people); and jobs meant to evolve rather than remain static.
Atlassian demonstrates this approach through three innovation rituals: First, "innovate every day" through their value of "be the change you seek"; second, structured "20% time" where teams spend one day weekly or one week in every five to seven focusing on innovation outside their regular workload; and third, quarterly "ShipIt" events-24-hour innovation sprints where employees work on whatever inspires them most. As Work Futurist Dominic Price explains, "Your business starts to feel like a laboratory that celebrates experiments, generates new ideas, seeks constant feedback and nimbly evolves."
Valve Corporation offers a radical workplace: "no bosses, no middle management, no bureaucracy; just highly motivated peers coming together to make cool stuff." Their approach is called "Flatland"-a completely flat organizational structure with no management hierarchy. As their employee handbook states: "Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability... But when you're an entertainment company that's spent the last decade going out of way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they're told obliterates 99% of their value."
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Learning: Developing People for Tomorrow's Challenges
Learning is essential for organizational success, yet it's often the first budget item cut. Technology has disrupted traditional learning, making vast resources available online. The key is shifting from content creation to curation, helping employees navigate available resources. A learning culture requires three components: freedom and autonomy, ambition, and acceptance of failure. Organizations must shift power from pushing learning to employees owning their development journey, treating them as responsible adults who choose what to learn based on their needs and interests.
Traditional job designs with rigid boundaries are disappearing as work becomes more integrated and collaborative. Peter Drucker's 1959 concept of "knowledge workers" is evolving into what Jacob Morgan calls "learning workers"-employees who not only possess knowledge but have the mindset to continuously learn, adapt, and apply learning to new situations. Learning programs must support this shift by providing accessible resources that develop collaboration, problem-solving, and innovation skills.
Learning is critical to employee engagement-people rarely leave organizations when they're constantly developing. Stagnation in learning plants the seeds of disengagement. Successful learning programs drive greater productivity and innovation, higher retention rates (70% of employees say learning opportunities influence their decision to stay), and create a visible culture of learning where employees take charge of their development with manager support.
Stonegate Pub Company created an engaging program centered around Albert Einstein and his theories of continuous learning. Albert appears throughout their online learning portal "Elsa" (named after Einstein's wife), where he narrates content, runs competitions, interacts through social media, and appears as a cartoon avatar. This fun, themed approach has yielded impressive results: $4.1 million in additional profit from management course attendees, increased internal promotions to 75%, and halved turnover.
MVF developed their sales academy by identifying what makes their best salespeople great, creating a six-step process that forms the foundation of the program. The three-month academy balances 60% learning with 40% practical work. The results have been impressive, with academy graduates achieving 2.6 times higher sales, increased collaboration, and improved staff retention. The success has been so significant that MVF is rolling out the learning academy concept across other departments, starting with marketing and SEO.
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Recognition: The Power of Acknowledgment
Recognition is a critical yet often mismanaged component of employee engagement, with companies spending $46 billion annually while half of employees don't even know recognition programs exist. The disconnect is stark: 80% of senior leaders believe employees are recognized monthly, but only 17% of employees feel their organization strongly supports recognition.
Long-service awards are outdated and ineffective, yet 87% of recognition spending goes toward tenure recognition. This approach fails in today's workplace where promising employees rarely stay long enough to receive such awards. Companies should instead invest in recognizing employees who demonstrate company values and behaviors that build great teams and products.
The second-biggest mistake in recognition is focusing on money rather than the message. Organizations waste time debating budgets and approval processes, but what employees truly value is the message itself. While cash awards and prizes can add fun, the thoughtful message matters most. Many recognition programs fail by making the process of saying thank you too arduous or by restricting the number of recognitions to meet budget constraints.
Recognition extends beyond formal award programs to everyday visibility. Employees want to know their work is seen and valued. Often, the small daily opportunities to acknowledge someone's work are missed. Recognition should be paired with cross-departmental communication to ensure fairness and understanding of different teams' contributions.
Effective recognition programs focus on two key outcomes: improved inter-departmental results and increased tenure. Peer-to-peer recognition across teams builds connections throughout the company, improving results and reducing risk. The National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of incidents occurred on a team's first day working together, while teams that stayed together for years performed better.
Venables Bell & Partners created quirky, non-traditional recognition programs including: the "boot award" for five years of service (a glass boot plus $1,000 to spend on colleagues, not themselves); annual holiday party awards like the "golden toilet" for those who "take care of shit gracefully," the "multiplier" (doubling salary for a month), "ass-kicker of the year" (bonus check), and a significant other award (spa weekend with babysitting); and the "Fearless project" award ($15,000 to pursue a creative idea). The results are impressive: 75% reduction in turnover, over 25% of staff employed for 5+ years, and double-digit revenue growth annually.
Virgin Group created "Virgin Stars of the Year," an annual recognition event that has evolved from a simple dinner with founder Richard Branson to a spectacular celebration rivaling the Oscars. About 50 employees from Virgin's 71,300 global staff are selected for bringing the brand to life and flown to London for what's described as "a once-in-a-lifetime magical experience." Beyond making employees feel valued, the program has measurably increased retention, engagement, and employee net promoter scores.
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Pay & Benefits: The Foundation of Fairness
Pay and benefits cannot independently create engagement but must be part of a broader strategy using multiple elements of the Engagement BridgeTM model. Pay is particularly important as a potential disengager when handled unfairly, while benefits can positively impact engagement through their visibility and tangibility.
There's no correlation between compensation level and engagement-employees can be engaged or disengaged regardless of their position on the career ladder. Pay alone cannot create lasting engagement, though it can certainly destroy it when handled poorly. The "Monkey and the Cucumber" experiment powerfully illustrates our fundamental aversion to inequity. In this study, capuchin monkeys happily exchange pebbles for cucumber pieces until one monkey receives a grape instead. The cucumber-receiving monkey immediately reacts with anger-throwing the cucumber back and rattling the cage. This mirrors exactly what happens in workplaces: an engaged employee can become instantly disconnected upon discovering pay inequity, even when previously satisfied.
Benefits should amplify employer money by providing perceived value greater than their cost. Smart benefits fall into four categories: Economic (helping employees save money), Cultural (supporting company values), Time-saving (maximizing productivity), and Regulatory (meeting legal requirements). The most effective benefits can increase employee net income by up to 10% while costing less than 0.1% of payroll. However, benefits only create value when employees know about, understand, and appreciate them.
Goodman Masson created their award-winning "Benefits Boutique" package with the strategic goal of treating their 140-person millennial workforce "better than any other business in the UK." Their innovative mortgage fund allows employees to save for a property deposit over three years, with the company adding 50% to salary contributions and 33% to bonus contributions. This approach has created a unique bond with employees by demonstrating exceptional generosity and addressing real financial pressures faced by their workforce.
Software company Basecamp implements a radically transparent pay model that mirrors their project management product's clarity. Everyone in the same role at the same level receives identical pay regardless of location, with salaries set at the top 5% of their Chicago market rates. They've eliminated negotiated salaries, individual raises, and traditional bonuses (building them into base pay instead). Rather than offering stock options, they share 25% of annual profit growth with employees and have promised to distribute 5% of proceeds should they ever sell.
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Workspace: Designing Environments for Engagement
Physical and virtual workspaces significantly impact employee engagement, either enabling or destroying it. As jobs become more varied and complex, workspace has taken on a more strategic role in engagement. The concept has evolved from merely thinking about physical workplaces to understanding it as a broader enabler of engagement and productivity.
Traditional office setups with fixed desks are becoming obsolete as work becomes more varied. Agile workspaces respect that different types of work require different environments-phone booths for calls, sofa areas for informal meetings, traditional desks for focused work. Unlike hot-desking where employees lose desks, agile working provides richness of choice. Modern agile workspaces resemble cafes or hotel lobbies, designed to maximize unexpected collisions between people.
Technology is as important as physical space in the workplace experience. Outdated systems cause frustration, with 72% of employees struggling to find information they need. The entire workspace-both hardware and software-must help employees do their best work. Cloud-based tools and modern communication systems like Slack or Workplace by Facebook are essential, though they can feel intimidating because they democratize information.
Effective workspaces should make employees feel proud, engaged and excited rather than frustrated. Well-designed spaces increase productivity, improve talent attraction, boost collaboration, and allow employees to bring their whole selves to work. Companies that excel at workspace design collaborate with courage, accommodate differences, take brave approaches, prominently display company values, and constantly iterate their designs based on feedback.
GE transformed their traditional offices where job grades determined office size to an activity-based working environment. Despite initial resistance, employees quickly embraced the new approach where the only permanent fixture was a home-floor locker, with everything else being temporary and fluid. Employees move throughout the building to spaces most effective for their current tasks. Surveys showed significantly improved satisfaction, with employees feeling the workspace promoted innovation and made GE an employer of choice.
Adobe created workspaces that engage all five senses to enhance employee experience and productivity. Under Eric Kline, Director of Global Workplace Design, they designed offices that "create and amplify culture through experiences that bring people together." Colors influence behavior, natural materials like wood and plants create calming effects, scents help employees feel calm or invigorated, and music enhances conversations. Their San Jose headquarters transformed from a sterile corporate feel to a vibrant space with immersive branding.
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Wellbeing: Nurturing the Whole Person
Wellbeing has evolved from a reactive strategy to reduce absences and control healthcare costs into an integrated, proactive approach addressing workplace wellbeing's biggest challenges. The most successful wellbeing strategies integrate three key strands: physical wellbeing (the most commonly addressed area), mental wellbeing, and financial wellbeing. While physical wellbeing is most visible, mental and financial aspects may be even more important but are often avoided due to stigma.
In today's rapidly changing world, companies need employees capable of good judgment and creativity, which suffer when people are exhausted. Technology-fueled disruption requires higher-level thinking from employees, making chronic workplace stress particularly destructive to company performance. Most corporations embrace a one-sided approach to flexibility-they expect employees to be available 24/7 through technology but resist true flexible working.
Successful wellbeing strategies focus on three key outcomes: reducing sickness absence and stress leave (addressing the $1.5 trillion in lost productivity from stressed workers), improving creativity and innovation (stressed employees invest energy in survival rather than ideas), and enhancing decision-making through sharper, more focused employees.
Boston Consulting Group tackled the "always on" mentality that was driving consultants to leave by developing their PTO program. Rather than implementing superficial work-life balance initiatives, BCG addressed the core problem by changing how work gets done. The PTO model has three components: Predictability (adding order by protecting set time off each week), Teaming (using facilitators to support open discussion about work priorities), and Open communication (enabling honest dialogue about work challenges). The program has yielded impressive results: 74% of consultants report being more likely to stay, teamwork has increased by 35%, client value has improved by 35%, and BCG rose to #3 on Fortune's "Best Companies to Work For" list.
LinkedIn's PerkUp! program gives employees an annual allowance ($2,000/year in the US) to spend on approved wellbeing and convenience perks including gym memberships, fitness classes, massages, childcare, and pet services. This personalized approach has been hugely successful with 80% global participation, serving as both a competitive advantage in recruitment and demonstrating the company's commitment to employee wellbeing.
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Building a Culture of Engagement: The Path Forward
As we reflect on the elements of the Engagement BridgeTM, three key insights emerge. First, the elements that create engaging cultures are often things we learned in childhood but somehow forgot or left at home when entering the workplace-telling the truth, trusting people, admitting mistakes, and being kind. As JJ Abrams notes about managing people, it comes down to "instinct, intuition and the golden rule of treating people as you want to be treated."
Second, the Engagement Bridge elements are deeply interconnected-leadership can't be separated from open communication, pay issues often relate to fairness which connects back to leadership and communication, and recognition requires visibility which depends on good communication. The model is a guide, not a manual; a lens through which to look, not a recipe.
Finally, successful companies fundamentally change how they operate regarding their people. Traditional HR policies and procedures are often disengaging, built around the belief that people are bad and the company needs protection. Rebels trust their people as individuals, give them voice and freedom, and deal with trust breaches individually rather than restricting freedom for everyone.
Whether you're an established company or startup, the most important thing is to start making changes. Working on employee engagement means making many small choices across the 10 BridgeTM areas, with the sum becoming your culture. Culture comes from the top but is delivered or damaged daily by policies and managers. HR should champion culture as a business improvement tool while providing measurement and feedback.
You can't be a rebel alone. Start by assessing your organization across the 10 BridgeTM elements, asking hard questions about what changes could improve engagement. Assemble your "rebel army" of allies who can help make an impact, and together write your own playbook that works uniquely for your organization. The BridgeTM model has an inherent bias for action-now it's time to get going!
