In 2015, Melcrum Inc., a best practice insight and technology company, conducted research on the challenges and best practices common among employee peers for boosting employee engagement. Melcrum’s explored how progressive companies (such as Lowe’s and EMC) were refocusing employee engagement efforts on collective engagement—employee-to-employee and employee-to-customer relationships needed to achieve company objectives, rather than the satisfaction of individual employees with their employer, manager and/or their immediate work environment.

Here is what was learned:

1. In highly uncertain environments, employees must engage collectively to tap the full resources of the entire enterprise.
2. Traditional engagement models that emphasize well-being, role clarity, and line-of-sight may inadvertently discourage employees from addressing challenges collectively.
3. Authentic employee voice provides credible examples of behavior and humanizes participants more than corporate messages can.
4. To enable employees to engage one another, Internal Communication must: a) provide platforms for employees to express their commitments to each other; b) act behind the scenes to shape, curate and amplify employee voice; and c) foster employees’ ability to develop an open learning culture and build their storytelling skills.
5. The extent of employee participation in collective engagement and their success at inspiring behavior worth emulating by other employees trumps survey scores as a measure of engagement.

The takeaway from this study in conjunction with coaching: A coaching culture could help provide collaborative dialogue to achieve the five concepts! 

To further add to the concept of dialogue, can you imagine for a moment if conflict in the workplace included the best practice approach of Solution-Based Coaching:

Helping the person tell their problem-story in such a way that reframes the presenting problem as being solvable, highlights the client’s resources and ability to define and move toward a solution, while at the same time building a collaborative relationship where the coach has permission to hold the client accountable for proposed action steps.

At its best, the solution-focused approach enables people to access and use the wealth of personal experiences, skills, expertise, and intuition that resides within all of us. It allows the person who is being coached to find individualized and creative solutions to the issues and concerns that face them. [From Evidence Based Coaching–Putting Best Practices To Work For Your Clients by Diane R. Stober and Anthony M. Grant]

A company’s most valuable asset isn’t products, processes, or technology—it is people.