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Employee Engagement the New Management Must Do

Employee Engagement is essential to make your business great

We all know by now that employee engagement is not just a buzz word.  We have been advocating employee engagement for some time.  But are we really good at it?

Employee Engagement is a description of the culture of the organisation.  Some leaders and organisations are just naturals at employee engagement.  They are genuinely interested in what their people think and value their employees input.  Unfortunately, engagement sometimes doesn’t come so naturally and leaders and businesses have to make a concerted effort to get employees and involved.

A great example of effective employee engagement taken to the nth degree is when employees own shares in their company.  Unfortunately, offering shares to your employees to keep them motivated and involved isn’t always available.  We have to find ways though to make that connection.  But before we get to that, why is employee engagement so crucial?

If you haven’t already read this,  a vital information source is the McLeod Report to Government published in 2009.  The report finds that successful employee engagement impacts on performance results.  The report  also found that taking steps to improving employee engagement actually correlated with improved performance.

The research also showed that levels of employee engagement correlated with

  • employee turnover
  • Number of accidents
  • Productivity
  • Profitability
  • Operating income
  • Bottom line results

Finally, the report found that one organisation had shown that those branches with significant increase in levels of employee engagement had a 16 percent higher profit margin than those branches that had shown a decrease in employee engagement.

Whilst an Employee survey is essential, there are many more aspects to great engagement. In summary these are:

  • Being clear about expectations both for getting the job done, and the employee experience
  • Embedding an easy and enjoyable culture of Wellbeing.  Understanding why people don’t attend work and addressing the core problem
  • Making sure that your people are at the forefront of any proposals and implementation of change
  • Creating a culture of harmony and avoiding unhealthy conflict
  • Knowing what it takes to get your people to love your business

People Discovery can help you improve your Employee Engagement by:

  • Diagnosing the current culture and making suggestions for change
  • Linking your employee engagement strategy with clear defined performance improvements
  • Designing and developing an employee survey
  • Helping to develop a people centric change control methodology
  • Understanding and solving workplace conflict
  • Help you to understand how to motivate your workforce.

What do you think?   Do you your employees engage?  If not why not? If they do engage well; what are the ingredients that make the connection successful?  We would love to hear from you.

Christina Lattimer

Christina has managed people for twenty seven years and led hugely successful teams. She has worked with people at all levels in various organisations to help them achieve their potential, and she has been actively involved in the learning and development field in a number of different roles. In latter years she worked as an HR Strategist. She has a range of management qualifications, is a learning professional with a BA Hons in Education, and is a Chartered Fellow of Chartered Institute of Personnel Development. She is passionate about people and believes everyone counts to make a great team.

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  • Tim Hadfield

    Hi Christina,

    Nice post and I completely agree with you about just how important employee engagement is. Chronic short term thinking in business has resulted in companies that are failing because their customers don’t trust them, and employees who are bored, disillusioned and frustrated. NOW MORE THAN EVER THIS NEEDS TO CHANGE AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IS KEY.

    I disagree with one thing you’ve said in the post though. Employee Engagement ISN’T a description of the culture of the organisation. There are many definitions of what culture is but for ease taking the simplest – ‘the way things are done around here’ – illustrates the difference. Culture describes how an organisation is, how it’s experienced by those who work there and how it influences results. Employee Engagement describes the degree to which employees are engaged and involved in the organisation. Whilst the two things do tend to correlate, they’re definitely not the same.

    Regards,
    Tim Hadfield

  • http://www.peoplediscovery.co.uk Christina Lattimer

    Tim

    Thank You for your comments. I do think businesses think short term and effective employee engagement doesn’t happen overnight, so it often isn’t addressed in a meaningful way
    In terms of my comment about employee engagement and culture; I think in my clumsy way, I was trying to say that employee engagement (or lack of) is usually a cultural issue. I agree with you completely that employee engagement in itself is not a description of the culture of an organisation. Many thanks for raising this and clarifying.

    Really appreciate your contribution

    Best

    Christina

  • http://www.kepplerspeakers.com/2011/07/stan-slap-on-1-2-10-the-concept/ Rich Bouma

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