I thoroughly enjoyed Tracy Maylett’s Engagement Magic. I think this book is a great resource for CEO’s down to front-line employees. I view this book as a self-help book just as much as a management book. The Five Keys (Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact, and Connection) can be used by the reader to improve both their personal and professional lives.
If you want to know one thing from this whole book, I would suggest it be this: “People engage with people, and they give more when they feel heard, empowered, and appreciated” (p 14). No amount of gifts, free lunch, bonuses, or “air hockey tables” will engage employees. There must be a managerial culture of engagement, of meaning, autonomy, growth, impact, and connection, to truly have engaged employees. I thought the book did a great job of showing what managers have done in many different organizations to engage their employees, none of which dealt with perks.
I do think the book could have used less stories and dug deeper into how to actually implement these keys. I do not think some of the chapters needed to be as long as they were. The chapter recaps were extremely helpful. If a reader was to just skim a chapter and then read the chapter recap, they would understand almost as much as someone who read the whole chapter word for word.