Employee Engagement

Increase Your Humanity and Increase Your Happiness

What is Employee Engagement? What, Why, and How to Improve It

There are a number of factors that contribute to employee engagement, including company culture, organizational communications, management styles, and leadership. Employee engagement initiatives are successfully implemented when HR professionals and managers work together and individually.

What is Employee Engagement?

In an organization, employee engagement is about the degree to which employees are committed and involved. In today's competitive business environment, employee engagement has emerged as a key factor for business success. Engagement at high levels leads to improved organizational performance and stakeholder value while fostering employee retention, customer loyalty, and increased customer satisfaction.

Engaging employees can be defined from a brief and concise definition to a descriptive and detailed understanding. In many definitions, one of the major emphasises is either commitment to the organization or positive behaviors that are shown by an engaged employee.

Workers who are disengaged tend to perform the bare minimum and do not care about their jobs. It can manifest itself in many ways, such as a sudden 9-to-5 mentality, a tendency to isolate yourself from coworkers and a refusal to participate in social events outside the office. It is most noticeable when someone who is normally enthusiastic and outgoing has nothing positive to contribute. Their work may make them miserable, they might gripe to their co-workers and they lower the morale in the office.

Often, satisfaction at work and engagement are used interchangeably. Researchers have found, however, that while engagement and satisfaction have some overlap, their individual characteristics are crucially different.

Behavioral and emotional engagement are factors that experts consider when defining engagement. The employees who are actively engaged in the work they do might report feeling focused and intensely involved. There is a sense of urgency and enthusiasm among them. Behaviors associated with engaged behavior include being persistent, proactive and adaptive in order to expand the job responsibilities when necessary. In terms of service delivery or innovation, for example, engaged employees go beyond job descriptions. Employees who are engaged are highly aware of what they need to accomplish and take a proactive approach, while employees who are satisfied feel well-satisfied, fulfilled, and happy. Job satisfaction in an organization is largely influenced by factors over which it has control (such as pay, benefits, and job security), whereas employee engagement is in large part determined by the employee's manager (such as job assignments, trust, recognition, and day-to-day communications).

In a workplace, employee engagement refers to the connection employees feel toward the work they do, their colleagues, and their organization. Employee engagement measures how employees feel about their organizations. A positive employee engagement can be characterized as a strong emotional connection to the organization's mission and goals. The emotional commitment of engaged employees means they care about their work and company. In other words, they work for the benefit of the organizational goals rather than just their paychecks.

Engaged employees contribute to the success of our organizations by striving to make them feel proud and loyal to our company, providing a great representation to clients, customers, and users, and going the extra mile to complete work. Engaging employees involves changing attitudes and behaviors in such a way that they trigger and reinforce one another as they lead to better business results. Engaging our employees means drawing out a deeper commitment from them so they take fewer leaves, miss fewer sick days, have fewer accidents, and receive less conflict and grievances. The key to employee engagement is alignment of organization actions with the organization's values. It is about keeping promises, or explaining why they cannot be kept.

What employee engagement is not

Engaged employees often gets confused with similar concepts, like happiness, satisfaction and wellbeing. It is important to understand that there are some important differences between these concepts. Engagement and happiness are two different things. In other words, it says nothing about how invested employees are in the company nor how hard they are working on behalf of its mission. An individual's level of happiness changes rapidly over time. When an employee receives a raise, they may feel temporary happiness, but then they may become disengaged again. In terms of employee engagement, employee happiness is not the same thing. A person might be happy at work, but that doesn't mean they are contributing to the company's success. Providing fun-and often beneficial-perks like Friday night keg parties, free massages, and games-in-the-office is different from ensuring employees are engaged. Employee engagement is not the same as employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is a hot topic in many companies and executives often speak about it, but the bar is set too low. A satisfied employee might show up for her 9-to-5 job without complaining. This same "satisfied" employee may not go the extra mile on her own, and will likely take the headhunter's call offering a 10% salary bump to lure her away. It's not enough to be satisfied.

Why is employee engagement important?

Many employers already recognize that employee engagement directly affects their organization, so they have much work to do in order to maximize the performance of their workforce.

Engaged employees and productivity are affected by social cohesion, a sense of belonging to a team, and knowing their ideas are valued. Employees who are highly engaged in their work will be more productive and committed to the organization in which they work.

Employees who are highly engaged have very positive opinions about their workplace. If your employees feel connected to their teams, enjoy their work, and feel good about the organization, they will want to continue to work for it and be willing to do more to help the organization succeed. The "brand advocates" are happy to talk about their company with family and friends. In turn, they motivate their coworkers to work harder.

Employees who are moderately engaged view their organization favorably. While they like their company, they see areas of improvement. They are less likely to ask for more responsibility and may underperform. There is something about their job or organization that prevents them from being fully engaged.

Employees who are barely engaged feel indifferent toward their workplace. Generally, they lack motivation for their job and will do as little as possible to get by -- sometimes even less. Rarely engaged employees are likely to be researching other jobs and have a high turnover rate.

Employees who are disengaged have a negative opinion of their workplace. They are disengaged from the mission, goals, and future of the organization. They don't seem to be committed to their jobs and responsibilities. It is important to know how to handle disengaged employees so that their negative perceptions don't negatively impact the productivity of employees around them.

The difference between engaged and satisfied workers is that engaged workers are more productive. Employees who are engaged make more discretionary efforts. Employees often want to go above and beyond the basics of their jobs. Leadership and management’s ability to channel energy and effort in the right direction provides a host of positive outcomes for employees.

Engaged employees have no reason to look for work elsewhere.

The employees of an organization have a desire to work for an organization with a successful strategy. It is important to them that they feel they can contribute to that success in their roles. The goal of every individual is to successfully contribute to winning teams and organizations.

The higher the employee engagement, the better the motivation and job satisfaction, and thus the lower the cost to value ratio of your human resources expenditures. As you know, every employee makes a positive impact on the bottom line, but every engaged employee makes that impact that much greater.

How employee engagement impacts employee, team, and business success

Feeling connected to your organization motivates your employees to work harder, stay longer, and motivate other employees to do the same.

The level of employee engagement impacts all aspects of a company, including profitability, revenue, customer service, and employee turnover.

You can count on your employees to show up when they're committed to your mission. Workplaces with high engagement experience 41% less absenteeism.

Engaged employees are more aware of their surroundings and can concentrate on the task at hand. Highly engaged workplaces have fewer safety incidents, according to research.

How do you build employee engagement?

The level of employee engagement is affected by many factors, including work culture, organizational communication, managerial styles, trust and respect, and the reputation of the company. HR managers and professionals play an essential role in ensuring that the organization's initiatives to engage its employees succeed together and individually.

Every employee in your organization influences employee engagement; from the relationships they build, to how they approach teamwork, to their general attitudes.

Employers should consider carefully the terms and conditions of engagement initiatives in order to increase employee engagement.

The employer has numerous opportunities to motivate employees and provide direction through "engageable moments."

Workforce surveys are often conducted by companies to study levels of employee engagement within their organizations as well as the relationship between employee engagement and business outcomes. An engagement survey can be used to determine which engagement initiatives are meeting their objectives. Employee engagement surveys can be useful in gauging employee engagement, but employers should know they differ from other employee surveys.

Employers should develop a comprehensive engagement strategy that goes beyond simply measuring engagement scores. Before an employee engagement survey is administered, a strategy for employee engagement should be created.

Engagement surveys focus on different aspects than other sorts of employee surveys. Engagement surveys measure employees' commitment, motivation, sense of purpose, and passion for their work and the organization, whereas employee opinion and satisfaction surveys measure their views, attitudes, and perceptions of their organization, and employee culture surveys evaluate how much they align with the organization or its departments.

Following the completion of a survey on employee engagement, survey data should be aggregated and broken down by business unit to allow managers to make decisions that will have a positive impact on employee engagement. As well as communicating survey results to their own employees, experts recommend implementing action plans based on survey recommendations. Additionally, the organization may require employees to develop engagement objectives as part of their performance reviews so that both top-down and bottom-up goals are developed.

The two most common errors that organizations make with engagement surveys are failing to gain senior management's commitment to action and failing to use focus groups to probe the causes of negative results.

To be successful, your engagement plan must be able to demonstrate real impact and influence everyone involved. Your engagement efforts should be measured against tangible measures, such as turnover rates, sales, customer satisfaction, and financial performance. Engagement boosts employee engagement and commits leaders to the process when they see the results.

To drive engagement, your engagement strategy must be a sustained effort-not a one-off initiative. If engagement is only addressed occasionally, employees do not feel heard and supported, and managers do not take it seriously. By listening to your employees throughout the year and prioritizing engagement, you'll see greater engagement and a better return on investment.

The role of managers in employee engagement

Among all employees, managers have the most contact with them. The environment has to be one of success, where each individual may thrive and feel engaged. Managers need to be able to:

Managers are your secret weapon to encourage employee engagement as they serve as a conduit between the boardroom and the workers. There are most likely few or no interactions with top executives for employees, but they may interact daily with their immediate supervisor. The tact of the manager will determine whether the employees feel secure, angry, or ignored.

Having a positive relationship with direct supervisors or managers has a dramatic impact on employee engagement. A correlation has been found between engagement levels of an employee and their direct supervisors.

An organization's middle managers play a critical role in fostering employee engagement by building a respectful and trusting relationship with their direct reports, communicating company values, and setting expectations for the day-to-day operations.

Research shows people leave managers, not companies. Therefore, it's paramount to ensure managers are actively involved in and managing employees' engagement.

However, middle managers need to be empowered by being given larger responsibilities and trained for their expanded roles. They also need to be more involved in strategic decisions. Communicating with employees in a targeted manner can encourage employees to stay engaged, get regular feedback and anticipate workgroup needs. Employers and managers need to take advantage of opportunities to engage their employees and should use multiple methods to do so.

The role of leadership in employee engagement

Employee engagement is a priority for organizational leaders. Their influence makes them the most effective campaigners and the leading advocates for an engaged culture. Engaging employees requires leadership buy-in.

A challenging job is what employees desire. Their interests include owning tasks that take advantage of their strengths and developing career opportunities. In order to keep employees engaged, it's important for employers and HR departments to match talent with positions that provide these elements.

Team relationships and leadership are vital to engagement. Workers want to be part of teams and leaders that value employees' contributions and are ethical.