Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals. This emotional commitment means engaged employees actually care about their work and their company. They don't work just for a paycheck, or just for the next promotion, but work on behalf of the organization's goals.

What Employee Engagement is not!
Employee engagement cannot be achieved by a mechanistic approach which tries to extract discretionary effort by manipulating employees’ commitment and emotions. Employees see through such attempts very quickly and can become cynical and disillusioned.

Components of Employee Engagement

There are two primary factors that drive employee engagement. These factors are based on statistical analysis and widely supported by industry research.

• Engagement with The Organization: measures how engaged employees are with the organization as a whole, and by extension, how they feel about senior management. This factor has to do with confidence in organizational leadership as well as trust, fairness, values, and respect - i.e. how people like to be treated by others, both at work and outside of work.
• Engagement with "My Manager": is a more specific measure of how employees relate to their direct supervisors. Topics include feeling valued, being treated fairly, receiving feedback and direction, and generally, having a strong working relationship between employee and manager based on mutual respect.

source: Custom Insight

Beyond the Two Core Engagement Factors

High performance organizations, and highly engaged employees, also excel in these areas:

• Strategic Alignment: Do employees have clarity of purpose and direction? Do employees understand how the work they do contributes to the organization's success? Strategic Alignment ensures that employees have clarity of purpose and direction, and that their efforts are focused in the right direction. If those efforts are not focused in the right direction, they could be wasted.
• Managing Execution: The most effective managers excel at the people skills, but they also provide clear expectations, hold people accountable, and stay focused on delivering results.

Leader and Manager Competency is measured as part of the employee survey via upward feedback. For a more complete assessment of manager competency,using a 360 Degree Feedback Survey is recommended

Who should be involved in employee engagement initiatives?

Research shows that many organizations struggle to bridge engagement survey results to its financial impact on the organization. It is important to understand how engagement affects a company’s bottom line.

A high-performing workforce is necessary to remain competitive, even survive. Developing programs to raise levels of employee engagement must be intentional, have meaning, purpose based on survey results.

HR can lead the charge to create an effective employee engagement strategy, but it needs to be embraced by the entire organization. There is a clear gap between the optimism of upper management and what middle managers experience with their teams. To understand the whole-organization picture, it’s essential to have an effective, multi-directional communication strategy in the organization. Effective communication is one of the most important factors that is most likely to bring company success. Organizations that thrive are able to articulate and communicate what success looks like – as individual employees, teams and departments, and the company as a whole. This increases engagement organization-wide.

Employee Engagement Drivers

Extensive research has been conducted to determine the factors that influence employee engagement levels. The research has indicated that there are both organizational drivers and managerial drivers. In today's digital age, less person-to-person interaction and increasing on-demand technology from chats and texts to social media updates and news feeds, is eroding employee engagement.

• Organizational Drivers: Some of the research identifies organization wide drivers of employee engagement. Quantum Workplace (the research firm behind the "Best Places to Work" programs in more than 47 metro areas) has identified six drivers of employee engagement that have the greatest impact:
  • The leaders of their organization are committed to making it a great place to work.
  • Trust in the leaders of the organization to set the right course.
  • Belief that the organization will be successful in the future.
  • Understanding of how I fit into the organization's future plans.
  • The leaders of the organization value people as their most important resource.
  • The organization makes investments to make employees more successful.
• Management Drivers: Employee engagement increases dramatically when the daily experiences of employees include positive relationships with their direct supervisors or managers. Behaviors of an employee's direct supervisors that have been correlated with employee engagement include:
  • The Gallup "Q12," which are 12 core elements that link strongly to key business outcomes. These elements relate to what the employee gets (e.g., clear expectations, resources), what the employee gives (e.g., the employee's individual contributions), whether the individual fits in the organization (e.g., based on the company mission and co-workers) and whether the employee has the opportunity to grow (e.g., by getting feedback about work and opportunities to learn).
  • Employees enjoy a good relationship with their supervisor.
  • Employees have the necessary equipment to do the job well.
  • Employees have authority necessary to accomplish their job well.
  • Employees have freedom to make work decisions.
• The Roles of HR and Management: Employee engagement is influenced by many factors—from workplace culture, organizational communication and managerial styles to trust and respect, leadership, and company reputation. In combination and individually, HR professionals and managers play important roles in ensuring the success of the organization's employee engagement initiatives.
• The role of HR: To foster a culture of engagement, HR should lead the way in the design, measurement and evaluation of proactive workplace policies and practices that help attract and retain talent with skills and competencies necessary for growth and sustainability.
• The role of Managers: Middle managers play a key role in employee engagement, creating a respectful and trusting relationship with their direct reports, communicating company values and setting expectations for the day-to-day business of any organization. Studies show that people leave managers, not companies and ensuring managers are actively participating in and managing employee engagement is paramount. But middle managers need to be empowered by being given larger responsibilities, trained for their expanded roles and more involved in strategic decisions. If an organization's executives and HR professionals want to hold managers accountable for the engagement levels, they should:
  • Make sure that managers and employees have the tools to do their jobs correctly.
  • Periodically assign managers larger, more exciting roles.
  • Give managers appropriate authority.
  • Accelerate leadership development efforts.
  • Ask managers to convey the corporate mission and vision and to help transform the organization.

According to a 2017 Dale Carnegie study, "Just 26% of leaders surveyed say that [employee engagement] is a very important part of what they think about, plan, and do every day. Another 42% say they work on it frequently, and the rest only occasionally, rarely or never."