Well done Nazneen. You are quite right. Employees when they first join a company are fully engaged. But then they meet up with the barriers and quickly become disengaged. So remove the barriers and magically they become engaged.
But the biggest barrier is use of the traditional top-down command and control approach to managing people because it tends to demotivate and demoralize employees. I used that for my first 12 years, then transitioned to its opposite, call it Autonomy and Support. That change caused huge increases in employee performance and allowed me to learn that top-down had actually created most of the problems I was trying to fix.
In my last turnaround as executive of a 1300 person unionized group, productivity increased by over 300%, morale and innovation went sky high, most employees literally loved to come to work, and we were able to crush our competition.
You are quite right Nazeen.
Best regards, Ben Simonton
Author "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed"