Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing in activating workplaces. We find your blind spots and opportunities and build you

the custom blueprint to get your teams delivering their best work, efficiently,

collaboratively, and with full engagement. So we can all agree that the Golden Girls was the greatest TV show of all time, right?

If not, please humor me for a few.

Because really, everything essential I understand about the world I learned from the girls,

watching them munch a late-night cheesecake.

Like there's one where Sophia, the eldest of the bunch, starts buying all of these household

items in bulk, and the girls are suddenly drowning in thousands of toothbrushes and bars of soap.

And Dorothy, Sophia's daughter, tries unsuccessfully to rein her in.

But not until they have their trademark heartfelt but hilarious

conversation does Dorothy come to realize what's really going on. Little white-haired Sophia is

afraid of her mortality. And on some level, her brain has convinced her that a closet full of

unused toothbrushes and soap will inoculate her against the inevitable. It's adorably incorrect,

but too many companies today are using their employee engagement surveys in the same way. They're

letting themselves believe in ways that are incorrect, but not at all adorable, that simply running a survey will inoculate them

against the inevitable, you know, disengagement. And yet, employee engagement is at an all-time low,

while burnout and disconnect rage on. These companies let themselves believe that because they run an

annual survey, they are doing employee engagement well, even while the data says otherwise.

In this way, the engagement survey is failing us all. It's lulling us into a false sense of safety, and we need to create change.

So what can we do here? Well, the good news is a lot. So we start by noting

the job to be done of an employee engagement survey. Jobs to be done is an actual framework developed

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