No. Social Technology or Social Media will not make your employees engaged

English: Description: Social Networking Source: own work Author: koreshky Date: 12/10/2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yes. That's true. Using social technologies (like internal blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, social networking etc) will not help you to increase the employee engagement scores of your organizations.

Employee engagement is impacted by three factors, IMHO:

• The engagement between the person's skills, passion and purpose with the role he/she is working in. If you have a person in the wrong job, no matter what you do, the person's engagement level is unlikely to go up.
• The relationship between the manager and the person - and the team the person works with.
• Organizational culture 

Social tools can help a person do his/her work faster by making discovery of information and experts faster. However if any of the above three factors cause engagement, it's unlikely that the employee would be using social tools - unless the tool is embedded in the way of work. As in, it auto updates details and updates when the employee updates a business record. These kind of "social glue" technologies (as Sameer Patel calls it) is still early stage.

Companies who expect such employees will get engaged and involved in sharing and participation need to address the root causes of disengagement and then expecting the tools to increase engagement.