Engagement is performance.
And happiness.
Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel mentally, emotionally and psychologically committed to their work and the organisation. It is the discretionary effort people are prepared to expend to do their jobs to the best of their ability.
Engagement is a well-established and highly communicated essential element in the recipe for organisational success - it leads to improved outcomes in productivity, profitability, sales, customer ratings, turnover, absenteeism, employee safety, wellbeing, and more.
We’ve known this forever, we talk about it, study it, survey it, seek it, celebrate it. So ensuring engagement underpins your organisation’s people strategy is a no-brainer - absolutely everyone wins.
Yet Gallup’s 2017 ‘State of the Global Workplace’ Report broadcasts that 85% of adults worldwide are either not engaged or are actively disengaged at work.
How can it be that so many organisations still haven’t got the most basic psychological requirements of employee engagement right yet? And what are the ingredients for success?
Laying the foundations for employee engagement requires your employees to have some basic psychological needs met:
Being equipped to perform -
Having a clear mandate for work.
Having the resources or equipment required to do work well.
Feeling valued as a person -
Having opportunities to do their job well, every day.
Being recognised for good work.
Feeling cared about by others at work.
Having someone who encourages their development.
Feeling valued within the organisation -
having opinions that are valued by others.
Feeling a sense of purpose through their job or the mission of the organisation.
Having a team who are also committed to doing great work.
Having a friend or confidante at work.
Growing at work -
Their professional development is a real conversation being had, regularly.
Having work that offers them real opportunities to learn and grow.
While these things feel relatively straightforward on a conceptual level, bringing them to life within your organisation is an ongoing and iterative project. However, this is a critical part of the journey towards being fully human in your organisational design. And it pays dividends in the long run.
“Businesses must recognise that an organisation’s vitality and capacity for organic growth is inextricably tied to the everyday experiences of its employees.”
Who owns it?
Is it the responsibility of the organisation to create a culture of engagement, or the responsibility of leaders to deliver leadership that engages their teams? We believe the answer is BOTH.
Yet, our guess is that leaders often leave it to organisational policies and practices to sort out, and that policy makers and senior executives probably leave employee engagement to their leaders to worry about.
If yours is an organisation testing engagement regularly and your scores are looking good, you’re probably relieved. You must be doing something right. But what is the ‘something’ - do you know? What are the meaningful actions, behaviours and conversations you’re having with your people to make them feel engaged, valued and part of something big? What happens if engagement drops - what will you do to bring it back up?
Maybe you’re losing people at an alarming rate. What’s going wrong with your engagement strategy or practices? What things haven’t you got quite right yet?
Or you’re an organisation that hasn’t quite got to the engagement conversation yet. Maybe you don’t know where to start?
LifeWork can help you to audit current engagement, identify areas for improvement within your existing approach, design highly impactful engagement strategies and work with you to truly operationalise engagement to embed it within your organisational culture.
