Employee Engagement gets attention: Tap into our experience and enjoy the results

Imagine everyone excited and enthusiastic about their work, clear about what they need to do and motivated to do it to the best of their ability, empowered to go the extra mile, committed to doing what’s right for your organisation, its people and customers. Now reflect on how this could result in increased revenue and growth, greater productivity, more innovation, higher retention, less conflict, fewer accidents and sick leave, reduced stress.

Sound too good to be true? Maybe a bit naive and ideallistic? Consider this evidence from The Employee Engagement Task Force (supported by the Department for Business Innovation & Skills in the UK) published in November 2012:

Organisations with high employee engagement:

• had twice the annual net profit;
• had 18% higher productivity;
• demonstrated revenue growth 2.5 times greater than those with low engagement scores;
• averaged 12% higher customer advocacy;
• report significantly less workplace stress;
• show turnover rate 40% lower than those with lower levels of engagment;
• have fewer workplace accidents.

Did you know that only one third of UK workers are engaged? Employee disengagement is contributing to low productivity in the UK and with 64% of people saying they have more to offer in skills and talents than they are currently being asked to demonstrate at work, there’s huge potential to improve engagement in UK which experts believe could yield an increase in GDP of £25.8 billion per year.

Wondering what you can do to get it? Let’s start by looking at the common pitfalls to avoid as regards employee engagement.

• Failing to recognise that telling people to be engaged doesn’t work! Command and control leadership of the 20th century doesn’t engage people of the 21st century. Engagement works when you create the right environment for people to be engaged.
• Thinking that measuring employee engagement is employee engagement. Taking the temperature is one thing, but unless you take action you will not increase employee engagement.
• Believing there’s a magic solution to employee engagment. While experts can help you to figure out how to create the right environment for people to be engaged, you have to do the work yourself by role modelling the behaviours and attitudes that contribute to employee engagement.
• Not involving your people in engagement initiatives and not investing in upskilling your people’s skills that enable engagment. Give your people the right resources to do their job and engage others such as train them in coaching skills and principles, teach them how to have honest conversations with their people about performance and development.
• Omitting to align your systems and processes with your values and strategy. Engagement works when everything is synchronised and working in a way that continually and consistently reinforces and supports what you say you want.
• Forgetting the small yet vitally important people aspects such as recognising people who are creating the right environment for engagement, rewarding behaviours that engage, supporting the wellbeing of all your people.

The four enablers of employee engagement are:

• Visible, empowering leaders who tell the compelling story of the organisation’s past, present and future.
• Engaging managers who treat people as individuals, coach and stretch them and give them focus and scope.
• Employees are core to the solution, their voice is heard, their views are exchanged across the organisation and it’s functions, so that engagement lives and breathes in its people.
• Organisation is congruent. What you say you will do, you do. The values you declare, you exhibit.

Three things you can do today to increase engagement:

• Empower your senior team to be visionary and inspiring leaders through executive coaching.
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• Involve your people in your organisations strategy and help them to see how they are contributing to the organisations current and future success.
  Contact us for further information on our real life case studies
• Equip your managers with coaching skills.
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