Employee Engagement

Except from Bill Kahn's work on The Ostrich Effect on Employee Engagement:

"A brief glance at the Gallup and Towers Perrin survey questions reveals what executives now believe to be the general sources of employee engagement.  Broadly speaking, those sources involve providing employees with well-designed jobs that call upon their strengths, recognition and praise, opportunities to grow and learn, colleagues and supervisors who value and appreciate them, and purpose and missions that matter to them."
...
"The reality is this: Employees are engaged only to the extent that they are emotionally available to be so."

I have seen this to be true time and time again.  Working in the game industry, you have to be engaged or else you won't survive.  There is always someone super engaged with your companies work, even if they don't work at the company yet, so to stay alive, you simply have to be engaged.  Furthermore, it's pretty easy if it's your hobby as well.  That being said, employees negative emotional responses limit all of their engagement.  These emotional responses can be triggered inside or outside of work.  To maximize our workforce's engagement, and therefore output, we need to recognize these emotions in our employees and do everything we can to get them to be better state of being.

"Of course, employees vary in terms of how much they follow such dictates.  But the internal struggle is there, beneath the surface, pre-occupying employees just when their managers want them to throw themselves fully into the work.  Until that struggle gets resolved, employees cannot fully engage."