Common approaches to building and measuring employee engagement focus on the connection of the employee to an organization (i.e., the place of work). This study reveals that current conventional approaches to activating employee engagement are often contrived and will fail to have lasting impact on engagement levels. What truly engages people is the work they do with others serving their constituents.
Using an approach that combines field research and foresight methods, this study explores new possibilities that shifts focus from what is done today, “employees to work-place,” to a reframing of how we might build and measure employee engagement. This reframing suggests that what is important is what employees do (work task), who they do it with (team/other employees) and who they do it for (constituents) and not about the connection to where they work (i.e., business or work-place).
The context of the study is a large regional teaching hospital that may soon move to a shared service model across the region for services like human resources typically the department tasked with building employee engagement. This particular hospital is also a leader on the topic of patient-centred care, which offers a lens to learn from and reveals common structures between what engages employees and how patient-centred care is practiced.
This study asks the question; how might healthcare organizations resolve the challenges to full employee engagement in the indeterminate contexts of patient-centred care?
Potential answers and insights are offered into these questions. A provocative account is provided of how we might build and measure employee engagement in the future.

Key words: employee engagement, patient-centred care, hospital, measurement, workplace, health care, healthcare