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Employee Engagement For Dummies
Author:
Published:
December 24, 2013
Overview
The easy way to boost employee engagement
Today more than ever, companies and leaders need a road map to help them boost employee engagement levels. Employee Engagement For Dummies helps employers implement the necessary plans to create and sustain an engaging culture, allowing them to attract and retain the best people while boosting their productivity and creativity.
Employee Engagement For Dummies helps you foster employee engagement, a concept that furthers an organization's interests through ensuring that employees remain involved in, committed to, and fulfilled by their work. It covers: practical steps to boost
employee engagement with your company or team; how to engage different generations of employees; the keys to reduce voluntary employee turnover; practical tools to help retain and engage your employees; processes that will boost employee retention and productivity; hiring the best fits from the start; and much more.
- Helps you recognize and understand the impact of positive employee engagement
- Helps you attract and retain the best employees
Employee Engagement For Dummies is for business leaders at all levels who are looking to better engage their employees and increase morale and productivity.
When you’re trying to engage your workforce, it helps to know how engaged they already are, and you can do this by conducting an employee engagement survey and acting on the results. A key way to build momentum following your survey is to draw on your engagement ambassadors — employees who are already fully engaged and committed to your company.
About The Author
Roy Barnes is one of the leading authorities on Customer Experience Design and Performance Management. He has more than 25 years of experience delivering world class results in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors.
Bob Kelleher is the author of Employee Engagement For Dummies and the Founder of The Employee Engagement Group.
Articles From The Book
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Although recognizing your employees is easy to do, it's also one of the easiest things to forget. Don't let this happen! Recognition provides reinforcement and spurs motivation — both key components of engagement. The suggestions in this article are designed to get your creative juices flowing so you can provide timely, specific, and meaningful recognition.
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If your goal is to motivate and engage employees and help them to become self-actualized, and you like a good Venn diagram, then you’ll appreciate what is called a “three circles” diagram. As you probably guessed, this diagram has three circles (see the nearby figure):
The first circle represents what the employee likes to do.
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The Greeks and Romans aren’t the only ones with myths. You’ll find plenty in the work world, too. For example, here are some myths about employee engagement:
Employee engagement is HR’s role. Most leaders, including many CEOs and CFOs, are highly analytical. They’re more comfortable with hard data than “soft” initiatives like employee engagement.
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Compensation is one good tool to use to encourage achievement and employee engagement. Here are a few tips that pertain to developing your compensation strategy:
Communication about rewards must be frequent and transparent. The distribution of rewards for high performance should not be kept secret. For example, if John is being given a plum assignment to reward him for his high performance, others should be told why John received the assignment.
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Exit interviews (interviews conducted with employees who are leaving the company) have long been considered a “gold standard” tool for determining how happy, satisfied, or engaged employees are. Why? Because in contrast with many vague comments often heard in isolation — think “My boss John doesn't really communicate very well,” or “Pam plays favorites” — exit interviews often reveal broader themes.
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Sure, exit interviews are helpful. But talking to employees after they've made the decision to leave is of limited use. By the time an exit interview reveals an issue, it's too late to correct it. Have you ever thought to yourself, “If only I had known — I could've done something before it was too late!”
Well, smart managers avoid this situation by routinely asking their employees how they're doing, why they're staying, and how they might be further engaged.
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Spouses and other family members have a huge influence on how a person feels about his job or company. These individuals' views on the firm can make the difference between keeping a valued employee and losing that person. They can also make the difference between having an employment offer accepted or rejected.
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Management can gauge employee engagement in several different ways. One way to figure out if employees are really invested in their everyday efforts is to assess your training investment; another is to track employee referrals.
Assess your training investment
When you invest in your employees, you generally see an increase in employee engagement scores.
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The trick to hiring the best new employee with the right combination of Behaviors, Education, Skills, and Traits (BEST) is knowing what behaviors, education, skills, and traits will yield superior performance for the job you seek to fill, and developing a job description that takes these into account. This will involve some thinking on your part.
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Boomers are ambitious — always have been, always will be. That said, an emerging trend is Boomers’ increasing interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Having successfully climbed the corporate ladder and accumulated the things their parents couldn't afford, Baby Boomers seem to have experienced a resurgence of concern about social and environmental issues.
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Have you ever heard the phrase “No good deed goes unpunished”? It refers to the fact that beneficial actions often go unappreciated (or may even be met with outright hostility). And if the actions are appreciated, they often just lead to additional requests.
Unfortunately, this maxim holds true for rewards, too.
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The process of performance appraisals can either encourage or discourage employee engagement at your company. Most people don't like their organization's annual employee performance appraisal process. Even the term is scary. “We're going to appraise your performance.”
The question is: Why? For one thing, there are the forms.
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Succession planning is crucial to employee engagement because it encourages faith in your employees and hope for promotion in an orderly manner. There is a challenge with succession planning within a company. People tend not to spend lots of time thinking about their retirement or demise.
If your firm does a lousy job succession planning, don't worry.
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Employees want and need to know the score in your business. Yet, very few companies establish an organizational scorecard, often called a balanced scorecard, to aid in this.
In layman's terms, a balanced scorecard is a set of quantitative metrics that a company can track and report on, hopefully to all employees.
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Most, if not all, managers say they should communicate openly and frequently with their employees — but often they don't. See, for many managers, communication falls in the category of “should do” rather than “must do.” And when we're busy, “must do” trumps “should do” every time.
That's where a communication protocol comes in.
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The only way firms can boost recognition is by formally introducing a recognition program — one that is measurable and has meaning. A 2012 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) notes the following:
When asked whether employees were satisfied with the level of recognition they receive for doing a good job, 34 percent of companies with formal recognition programs answered yes, compared to 18 percent of companies without such a program.
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Not surprisingly, Twitter has become a popular site for employers looking for new engaged employees, as well as to communicate other unique aspects of their companies, not to mention find prospective recruits. It is the world's fastest-growing social media site, with close to 600 million users and 11 accounts added every second.
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A great way to share best practices among employees is to create a "corporate university" — in other words, create learning materials and make them accessible to employees.
Creating a corporate university doesn't have to be a huge investment. In fact, you can launch yours simply by collecting and branding all the training, development, conferences, seminars, and other materials and opportunities you already have in place.
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Values are beliefs that are shared among the stakeholders and employees of an organization. They drive an organization's culture and priorities, and provide a framework in which decisions are made. Examples of values include the following:
“Innovation is the cornerstone of everything we do.”
“Collaboration is the hallmark of our culture.
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Instead of limiting rewards to money, adopt a total rewards strategy that will increase achievement and engagement among your employees. That means expanding your definition of rewards beyond cash. A total rewards strategy may include the following:
Base salary: Yes, this refers to money. Obviously, your employees need to earn a living.
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A big part of employee engagement in your firm is developing goals for each employee. Developing a road map for the future involves the following:
Establishing performance goals for the upcoming year: This should be a list of five or six high-impact SMART goals to be achieved in the upcoming year. These goals should be linked to one or more of the company's strategic priorities (think environmental health and safety, employee engagement, innovation, quality, efficiency, and so on).
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You should diversify your approach to rewards in order to encourage achievement and engagement among your employees, but compensation is still a key part of the equation. Careful compensation is one great way to reward employee engagement.
Unfortunately, some managers use what could be called the “peanut-butter approach” to paying their employees.
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Engaged employees are active in two-way communication with their employers. Does this sound familiar? “I have one boss who tells me one thing, and another boss who tells me something else!” Or, “Who reports to whom around here?” Or, “How do I get anything done when my team members all report to different people?
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You've probably heard the term brand ambassador. A brand ambassador is someone who embodies a brand and serves to promote it. Similarly, an engagement ambassador embodies engagement and serves to promote it.
Hopefully, your organization is brimming with people who might serve as brand ambassadors. These are people who are visibly engaged and committed to your organization.
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When you’re trying to engage your workforce, it helps to know how engaged they already are, and you can do this by conducting an employee engagement survey and acting on the results. A key way to build momentum following your survey is to draw on your engagement ambassadors — employees who are already fully engaged and committed to your company.
Human Resources
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Employee engagement is more than a program; it entails a cultural shift — a change in how things are done and communicated from the top to the bottom of an organization. Engagement can't be shunted to the end of every meeting, where it will stand a higher chance of being given short shrift.
It's no one person's job; it is an ongoing part of business.
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Researchers overwhelmingly agree: Engaged employees drive innovation. Engaged employees are empowered to seek ways to innovate, whether that means improving the customer experience, boosting profitability, building the brand, improving marketing, improving quality, or simply being more creative.
Too often, people think innovation is limited to research and development, technological advances, or filing a new patent.
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Recognition, rather than rewards or compensation, is a useful tool for increasing employee engagement in your company. Here are a few ideas and best practices to keep in mind as you build your recognition program:
Schedule reminders. Having your employees schedule time to recognize colleagues is an easy and impactful way to encourage recognition.
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Using gamification in the workplace can help encourage desired behaviors among your employees. First, you have to determine which user behaviors will drive the objectives you identified. Put simply, behaviors are the foundation of all gamification programs.
Once key behaviors are identified, you can determine which game mechanics are most likely to drive those behaviors and reward users for performing those behaviors — that's what gamification is all about.
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As you develop your organization's engagement plan, you'll want to take all these generational differences into consideration. First, however, you should get a sense of how many Millennials, Gen Xers, Boomers, and even Traditionalists you have in your firm. Use a form like this one to write down your numbers.
For help juggling the various priorities of each generation, see this table.
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These days, many people, including your employees, give the stink-eye to corporate policies and practices that enable an elite group to accrue wealth at everyone else's expense. They demand a higher level of responsibility — namely, corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Corporate social responsibility is the idea that organizations have moral, ethical, environmental, and philanthropic responsibilities above and beyond their responsibility to legally earn a fair return for investors.
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Just as employee engagement is more important than employee satisfaction, so, too, does customer engagement trump customer satisfaction. A satisfied customer will supply a positive review of your company if asked, but an engaged customer will go out of her way to “brand” her satisfaction with your product.
Apple is great at getting customers to live their brand.
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Employees’ dedication speaks volumes to clients and customers. Not to be clichéd, but a company's employees truly are its greatest asset! Most leaders understand this connection on an intellectual level, but they often struggle with what to do to foster this type of dedication. To engage Baby Boomers on your staff, you'll want to consider the following:
Foster a non-authoritarian work environment.
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It’s great when your company uses social media to broadcast its employment brand. But what’s really great for employee engagement is when a company’s employees use these technologies for the same aim — particularly when those employees are what author Malcolm Gladwell calls “connectors”.
According to Gladwell, connectors are people “with an extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances.
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An engaged workforce is a workforce that consistently sets and meets realistic goals. Goals without focus are merely ideas. Nowhere is this more true than in business. Perhaps entrepreneur and author Jim Rohn said it best: “Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.”
But often, people allow themselves to be distracted and lack the discipline to complete what they start out to do.
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Communication to employees starts at the top, with the CEO, president, or other appropriate executive. But in order for clear communication to become part of your corporate culture — and make no mistake, this is absolutely critical for engagement to take hold — there must be a process by which the message is cascaded down and reinforced by every level of management.
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If your organization has declared that employee engagement is a top business objective, then it should also assemble an employee engagement committee. This committee, which will consist of 10 to 20 people (depending on the size of your company), should have a clear charter to evaluate and prioritize employee engagement survey results, with an ultimate goal of increasing employee engagement, boosting innovation, improving the firm's culture, and even changing company policies.
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Money is not always a primary engagement driver for employees — although the perception of unfairness or an organizational caste system (in which there are clear “haves” and “have nots”) is certain to lead to disengagement. Purpose, however, is an engagement driver. Indeed, organizations that build their cultures around purpose generally have higher levels of engagement than those that don't.
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A key aspect of employee engagement is motivation — why people do what they do. A person may be motivated by any number of things: to attain status or money, to help others, to find meaning in life, or simply to express herself.
There is a difference between someone who's motivated intrinsically and someone who's motivated extrinsically.
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Just having your company leaders talk about employee engagement isn't enough. You must embed engagement champions throughout your workforce. Identifying the right employees as your engagement champions is key to building a culture of engagement. Failing to do so will severely hamper your engagement efforts.
To identify your engagement champions, first you need to understand your own culture.
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Your company doesn’t have a monopoly on great ideas, approaches and processes. In fact, the architects of the present systems (that is, you and your current colleagues) are often incapable of “building the better mousetrap,” so to speak.
Fortunately, new hires are amazing sources of new ideas. Their experiences outside your company may have exposed them to superior ideas, approaches, and processes.
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Increasingly, employers understand the importance of employee referrals as a source of engaged employees. Who better to understand a firm’s culture than the employees of the firm? And engaged employees are more likely to find and promote yet more engaged employees.
In fact, a 2012 study by the Temkin Group revealed that engaged employees are 370 percent more likely to refer their company to friends than disengaged employees are.
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If you're looking to find engaged employees, social media is great news! Social media enables employers to post employment opportunities while at the same time positioning their overall brand. Some companies have even begun eschewing the former for the latter, focusing their hiring-related social media campaigns more on the company's brand and culture — what they do and who they are — than on highlighting individual jobs.
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The idea for hiring good employees is to craft interview questions that are targeted toward the specific behaviors and traits that are unique to your organization and to the position. Although traits like enthusiasm, patience, selflessness, and optimism may be desired in almost any company, there will be differences in positions’ requirements that require tailored inquiry.
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When you are looking to hire employees that will be engaged with your company’s vision and goals, you can find a lot out during interview. Of course, knowing what questions to ask in a job interview is only half the battle.
You must also assess the candidate's responses to these questions to determine whether he's the right fit for the job and for your organization as a whole.
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Company branding and engagement are connected, so writing an employee value proposition (which basically says who you are and why people should work for you) is an important step towards engaging your workforce. Your company should communicate your brand internally and externally.
So, what does branding have to do with employee engagement?
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If your goal is to improve employee engagement at your firm, you first need to find out just how engaged your employees are now. Discover various ways to gauge employee engagement, both now and in the future. These include employee surveys, exit interviews, “stay” interviews, and other engagement barometers such as training investment and employee referrals.
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Imagine visiting an office, a known high‐performing site. What does employee engagement look like? Well, while there, you notice a palpable buzz in the air. The receptionist welcomes you with an amazingly warm smile and everyone you encounter in the halls greets you in a similar fashion.
Navigating the rows of work stations, you notice that most everyone appears totally focused on their jobs, but that their focus is occasionally interrupted by laughter and healthy banter.
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Saying communication is “important to engagement” is a little like saying Mardi Gras is “kind of exciting.” Indeed, communication is so important to employee engagement, it’s often called the cornerstone of an engaged culture. There's no doubt about it: Communication helps drive most successful new company initiatives, ideas, and ventures.
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Corporate social responsibility, or CSR, is a big part of having an engaged workforce. A company whose very mission is CSR will be very attractive to many engaged workers!
Many CSR activities are inexpensive or free to launch, and pay significant engagement benefits. If you’re looking to incorporate CSR into your organization, consider these tips:
Allow employees to take one paid service day per year with an approved nonprofit or charitable organization.
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Surveys can help you gauge how invested your employees are in your business. Obviously, simply conducting an employee engagement survey isn't enough. You have to analyze the results to determine what to do. As you're analyzing the results, you may notice variations in several key areas:
Generation: Engagement scores and needs often vary significantly across generations, and addressing these variances requires careful action planning.
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An Employee Value Proposition (EVP), which you may think of as your employment brand, is an important element in employee engagement. To be effective, you must also communicate that employment brand, both internally and externally.
If you commit to broadcasting to your employees and to the rest of the world why you’re a swell place to work, in time, they’ll come to believe it (assuming, of course, that it’s true)!
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As part of the process of increasing employee engagement in your company, an EDP (employee development plan) should include a summary of the employee's 360-degree assessment. So, what's that?
In answering that question, here’s a cue from Socrates's playbook (asking another):
What is one key drawback of the traditional one-on-one review?
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Odds are, your employees can articulate what you do as a company, the services you offer, and the products you sell. But can they speak to who you are, and why you’re a great employer? For many companies, this is an area of real struggle — and this struggle can lead to a lack of engagement.
To rectify this, you must identify your company’s Employee Value Proposition (EVP) — that is, who you are and why people should work for you.
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The tendency after an employee engagement survey is to overpromise and underdeliver. If you succumb to this temptation, you run the risk of creating a skeptical work culture. (“They told us they would do [fill in the blank], but we've seen nothing!”) To avoid this problem, implement a rigorous priority review process that uses an idea priority matrix.
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Generation X employees are looking for specific values in their work in order to feel engaged. If you're tasked with engaging Gen Xers, consider these points:
Don't pile it on. Boomers may be motivated by a heavy workload, but the opposite is often true of Generation X. Instead, independence and free agency are watchwords for Gen X.
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Keeping your younger workforce engaged can bring a lot of energy to your company. Are you tasked with engaging Millennials? If so, here are a few ideas:
Harness technology for communication. Where Gen Xers are technologically savvy, Gen Yers are technologically dependent. Having grown up well after the advent of computers, the Internet, and mobile phones, Gen Y is accustomed to enjoying instant communication and having information at their fingertips.
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When it comes to innovation, engagement is both a chauffeur and a passenger — that is, it both drives and is driven by innovation. Indeed, innovation is a key engagement driver. Employees want to create, be current, evolve, contribute new ideas and approaches, and work for the market leader.
Here are some tips to help you convert your thoughts on innovation into action:
It starts at the top.
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In 2013, SilkRoad, a cloud-based talent management solutions provider, asked 2,200 global clients, “What are the best mechanisms to foster employee engagement?” Not surprisingly, four of the top seven answers pertained to career development and learning opportunities. The power of career development, learning, and growth opportunities in improving engagement was also confirmed in the Dale Carnegie research.
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Game mechanics are the components of a game — the tools employed by game designers to generate and reward activity among players (or, in the case of a gamification program, employees, customers, or other users). Most gamification programs in the workplace leverage game mechanics in one way or another.
When it comes to game mechanics, various tools are available to you, each designed to elicit a specific reaction from players.
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To increase the chances that your employees become and stay engaged, and that your organization's goals will be met, you must connect the metrics in a balanced scorecard and other key organizational goals to each employee's job.
This is critical in building a “line of sight,” which is key to employee engagement.
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When you are working on a process of employee engagement, you should look at how metrics for teams — that is, internal business units and/or profit centers — boost engagement.
For example, suppose you work for a national retail chain. If you include these types of measurements in a team performance assessment, employees who work at one of your retail stores can see how their store is performing compared to other stores in the chain.
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You can take several steps to prepare for a new employee's arrival, and thus prepare for an engaged employee from the start. Alexander Graham Bell once said, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to onboarding new employees.
The day before a new employee starts
You don't need to wait for the employee's start date to begin the onboarding process.
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If want to engage and motivate staff members who were born between 1965 and 1980 (known as the Generation X), try these some rewards specifically targeted to Gen X:
Time off: Gen X brought the concept of work–life balance to the workplace, and today they're at the age where they're working parents with dual responsibilities.
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Part of keeping your workforce engaged includes rewarding them. Employees of different ages respond to different types of rewards. Baby boomers and older employees respond well to the following types of rewards:
Key assignments: Although people tend to associate the term reward with something monetary, that's not always the case.
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If you want to keep Gen X employees engaged at work, remember training and development is the key. Members of Generation X have been frustrated by their career progression — or lack thereof. Having been pummeled by a deep and painful recession, Gen X is waiting for its next big opportunity.
In the years ahead, money will be more of a driver for Generation X than for its Boomer and Gen Y counterparts.
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Generation Y workers — which will soon be the largest workforce demographic (if they aren't already) — require a continuous flow of positive feedback. Keep them engaged by offering them training, development, and constant feedback.
Born between 1980 and 2002, this highly computer-oriented group is characterized by hope about the future, social activism, family-centricity, and the desire for diversity.
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Having an engaged workforce starts with finding the right employees. You can use social media to help you start the hiring process. The world's largest social networking site, Facebook boasts more than 1 billion (that's billion, with a b) users. Although originally a social networking site for people to stay connected with family and friends, Facebook is increasingly becoming a tool for job seekers and employers alike.
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An EDP (employee development plan) is one good way to encourage engagement in your workforce. So, how do you use an EDP? Here's a breakdown: The manager completes the EDP forms.This step includes providing an assessment of the employee’s past performance, as well as a road map for the future. (The manager can partner with his HR manager as needed for guidance writing effective goals, providing reinforcing and constructive feedback, and so on.
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The characteristics of an engaged team is actually something most people already know. After all, everyone’s been on a sports team, a dance team, in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, on church committees, or in a play group, and has seen what works and what doesn’t.
But in the interest of being thorough, this list spells it out here.
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When you think about whether your workforce is engaged with your company’s purpose, and why they should be, ask yourself if they are even aware of that purpose. Go to your company's website, and try to find out why it's in business. Not what you do, make, or sell — but why.
Most companies know what they do, make, or sell.
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Engaged employees are those who understand and are on board with an organization’s purpose. An organization's vision, expressed in the form of a vision statement, outlines what the organization wants to be and/or how it wants the world in which it operates to be.
As author Andy Stanley notes, vision is “what could be and what should be, regardless of what is.
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People of different generations don't just communicate differently. They also have different motivational drivers. Smart managers adjust their communication, leadership, oversight, recognition, and patience levels when leading a department populated by people of different generations.
The descriptions that follow are merely generational generalizations.
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The key to building an engaged workforce is putting in place the necessary measurement and reward systems to capture employees’ extrinsic motivation, while also understanding the unique intrinsic drivers that motivate each of your employees. Often, these intrinsic motivational drivers will differ from person to person, so you need to get to know your employees well enough to understand their intrinsic motivational drivers.
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Employee engagement is tied to innovation, productivity, creativity, and longevity in your workforce. Still,you need to measure employee engagement, just as you would any other business objective, regardless of whether employee engagement becomes part of your balanced scorecard.
Historically, the gold standard for measuring employee engagement has been voluntary employee turnover.
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Here are the five levels in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and how you can apply them to the workplace to engage your employees. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a psychology theory posed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation.”
According to this theory, all people have needs that must be satisfied.
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Employee engagement is a process that begins in the employee’s first few days and weeks. During the onboarding process of new employees, you'll want to make it a point to establish performance expectations, goals, standards for high performance, promotional opportunities, and whatnot. Doing so is key to engaging new employees.
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A big part of cultivating an engaged workforce is choosing the right people as employees. Often, when faced with selecting employees (in other words, hiring), employers focus on candidates’ education and skills. And yes, those are important.
After all, if you're looking to hire a rocket scientist, you should probably make sure any candidates you consider have the necessary schooling and abilities (think: knowledge of calculus and deftness with a pocket protector) to do the job.
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It’s often amazing the misguided focus of hiring managers, who place too much emphasis on education and skills and not nearly enough on behaviors and traits. The fact is, the most engaged employees are engaged because of behaviors and traits they exhibit, not because of their skill set or the educational degrees they hold.
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Branding can drive engagement among employees. Not surprisingly, however, branding can also play a part in helping you to attract engaged recruits. That’s why your organization’s marketing team should be working cheek and jowl with your staffing and resource teams to co-brand and co-publicize messages both internally and externally.
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When a position opens in an organization, the inevitable is: Should you hire from outside or promote an employee from within? The answer is simple: Before you ever look to hire externally, you must advertise openings internally and evaluate in-house talent for promotional and or lateral opportunities. If you don't, your existing employees will disengage.
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Of course, it’s not enough to say where you want to go. You also have to develop a strategic plan to get there. This includes allocating the necessary resources — people, money, paper clips, what have you — to get where you’re going. Most organizations develop a new strategic plan every three to five years. Building a strategic plan involves the following key steps:
Conduct a SWOT (short for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats”) analysis of your current business position.
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Companies should view the hiring and selection process as a sales opportunity of sorts. This is how you find the most engaged new employees. In a typical hiring scenario, candidates attempt to “sell” themselves to a potential employer. But the truth is, it should be the other way around.
Think of the preparation that goes into the sales process: Companies spend thousands if not millions of dollars hiring experts to help crystallize their brands and messages.
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You can't expect to make a credible business case for employee engagement if you don't include a set of business goals and objectives, can you?
If your leadership team wanted to increase sales, they would put in place sales objectives. If they wanted to decrease defects in manufacturing, they would outline quality objectives.
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Are your employees engaged? Good question. And the only surefire way to answer with any accuracy is to conduct an employee engagement survey. Your organization should conduct an employee engagement survey sooner rather than later to gauge its pulse. As you embark on your survey, keep these points in mind:
Don't conduct a survey unless you're convinced your leadership is committed to listening and acting on feedback.
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When you are working towards engaging your workforce, you might also look to add new employees or promote the most engaged employees you already have. Here is a simple outline for helping you identify what will make for more engaged employees.
Most static organizations — that is, organizations that are change-averse or that refuse to embrace new technologies, workforce trends, or market changes — evaluate the skills and education of candidates when determining whether they're suitable for hire or promotion.
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Unfortunately, employee disengagement is much too prevalent. Since the Great Recession of 2008–2009, a “perfect storm” of company layoffs, marginal opportunities, minimal pay increases and bonuses, limited opportunities for promotion, and reduced training and development has resulted in rising levels of disengagement.
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Back in the day, fostering diversity in the workplace was mostly about complying with various laws that guarantee equal opportunity regardless of age, gender, race, physical ability, religious beliefs, and in some areas, sexual orientation.
Now, however, smart companies grasp that diversity — or inclusion — is both broader and more subtle.
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Employee engagement in your firm can begin within the first few days of a new hire’s time with you. Studies show that roughly 33 percent of employees decide to stay onboard with a firm or jump ship within their first 30 days of employment. Given this, you'd think companies would work to put their best foot forward with new hires through effective onboarding (new-hire orientation).
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There are several ways to engage employees in two-way communication. In addition to communication waterfalls, for top-down communication, you also need communication fountains — that is, vehicles to propel communication from the bottom up. For engagement to truly take hold, employees must feel comfortable communicating upward.
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Employee engagement begins during the process of hiring and acclimating a new employee in your company. As you develop your onboarding program for employee engagement, it helps to consider things from a new hire's point of view. You can assume that most new employees will have several questions. Some questions will pertain to their first day at work:
Where and what time should I report?
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Clearly, decisions made from the heart aren’t entirely rational or logical. So, what does this have to do with employee engagement and employment branding? Simply put, branding is a lot about capturing someone’s heart.
Consider Apple. Although Apple’s star shines brightly today, it wasn’t so long ago that Apple was on the brink of collapse as PCs were killing Macs in the marketplace.
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Group development leads to engagement in the workforce. Here is an idea useful to helping you understand how to keep your team engaged. In 1965, psychologist Dr. Bruce Tuckman proposed a model of group development that he called “Tuckman’s Stages.” This model included four stages:
Stage 1: Forming
Stage 2: Storming
Stage 3: Norming
Stage 4: Performing
To help you understand this model, here’s an example: Suppose you and your partner decide to have a child.
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Both rewards (which usually have a cost associated with them) and recognition (which is typically free or of minimal cost) are essential components of an effective employee engagement strategy.
If you have a child — or, for that matter, a dog — you know that positive reinforcement is key. It's not enough to simply tell said child (or dog) how you want him to behave; you must also recognize his good behavior with a kind word and perhaps even reward him with, say, a treat.
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Interested in applying gamification to your business in order to help increase employee engagement? If so, the first thing you need to recognize is that gamification, like any attempt to improve employee engagement, requires an investment of time to develop a multistep process to ensure success.
Gamification is a program, not just a project.
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Even the mere hope of receiving a reward — even a really lousy one — can motivate an employee to perform a desired behavior. Why? Oddly, it's not the reward itself that's motivating; instead, it's the achievement tied to the reward. That is, the reward acts to validate the achievement. It makes sense, then, that successful gamification hinges on the use of rewards (preferably good ones).
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Looking to communicate about job openings and about your culture at the same time? Then YouTube, which boasts more than 1 billion unique users each month, may be the way to find those engaged employees. On YouTube, an employer can post videos describing what the organization is, preferably from the eyes of actual employees.
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If you're looking to hire, you can't afford to overlook social media. That means maintaining relevance on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This is particularly true if you're in the market for Gen Y workers. "Maintaining relevance" is, of course, the key phrase. Otherwise, you can expect users to ignore your feeds.
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Employee engagement ideally starts during the interview and hiring process. Next, an onbarding program should help the employee’s first few days go smoothly and comfortably. One easy thing to do is send an e-mail to a new hire a few days before he or she will start.
Need a little help with your “Welcome to the Company” e-mail?
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What, exactly, drives employee engagement? In recent years, the business world has reached a consensus: Employee engagement is good for the bottom line. It's a simple equation, really: If you can't satisfy the demands of your clients or customers, you're going to lose business. And the way to reach extraordinary levels of client and customer service is through engaged employees.
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Does your organization have low employee retention rates? Is your onboarding process a drag? Do you have trouble getting employees to collaborate, share knowledge, or keep records the way they should? All these problems stem from — you guessed it — a lack of employee engagement.
Enter gamification. Simply put, gamification is the use of game mechanics and rewards in a non-game setting to increase employee engagement and drive desired behaviors.
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If you’re interested in learning about employee engagement, it’s probably because something's not quite right at work. People talk about leaving as soon as the economy improves. They no longer speak well of the company to each other or to potential recruits. It's as though people are just getting through the day, the week, or the month — that they're only there for the paycheck.
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Performance appraisals represent a significant opportunity for supervisors to build a mutual commitment with employees — which is a key engagement driver — but more often than not, this opportunity is wasted. That's because performance appraisals tend to focus on trailing feedback rather than leading feedback.
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Exit interviews can help employers gauge how engaged their workforce is with their organization. Especially if your company is experiencing high turnover, exit interviews can help determine why. Here are some examples of exit-interview questions:
Would you describe your work as rewarding/challenging/interesting?
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The best surveys about employee engagement contain a blend of closed-ended questions and open-ended questions. Here are a few examples of both types, which you can use yourself or build upon to create your survey.
Don't ask too many questions, or you run the risk of survey fatigue. As a general rule, 10 questions is not enough, and 100 is too many.
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Employee engagement results in lower absenteeism and turnover, as well as higher productivity and profitability. A 2012 Gallup study — which examined nearly 50,000 business or work units and roughly 1.4 million employees in 192 organizations across 49 industries and in 34 countries — concluded that employee engagement has a huge impact on these and other key organizational outcomes, regardless of the economic climate.
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A companywide employee engagement survey is the most thorough tool for capturing your company's engagement baseline. Such a survey can help you determine where to invest first to increase engagement; it can also validate (or not) your employee engagement efforts down the road.
Employee engagement surveys also enable you to view engagement levels within various departments or business units in your organization in comparison with each other and with the company as a whole.
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Keep your Gen X and Gen Y employees engaged at work by understanding more of what motivates them. The first generation to insist on work–life balance, this group, born between 1965 and 1980, includes more women, as well as men who have assumed more home and family responsibilities.
Not surprisingly, Generation X was also the generation that pushed for paternity benefits and support for stay-at-home dads.