As someone who is keenly focused on this area and who has seen first-hand the effect of negative employee engagement on a business’s bottom-line. I was curious to read a recent article by Mark C Crowley, entitled “Employee Engagement Isn’t Getting Better and Gallup Shares The Surprising Reasons Why”. In this post, Crowley describes that despite a real focus and resources applied to improving the metric of employee engagement in the US, the recent studies show that the numbers are essentially just as low as when Gallup began measuring engagement in the 1990s.
In the beginning there was a great deal of skepticism about this idea that employee engagement even matter, but over the years, the research has shown that it is one of the indicators of how well an organization performs, all the way to the bottom line. I’ve seen this in action a number of times. Picture an organization that has seen years of success, growth, revenue and profits on the rise; markets and industry changes and they continue to do the same thing they were doing before, hoping for the same results. But our world economy has changed, our labor force has a very different definition of what ‘motivation’ means and work has become more challenged by competition, technology and the very fast rate of change.
Without an eye to how engaged your employees are, it is difficult to make all the right moves, keep up with the changes in your industry and ride the wave of change that will keep your business growing and succeeding. I’ve also seen businesses that have a strong employee engagement, become swept up in acquisitions, where the new culture ignores the value of the pre-existing employee engagement scores. Ultimately, as the Gallup research shows, “traditional leadership practices have produced the enemy that is low engagement”.
Several times a day, I hear the same complaint from leaders about poor employee retention rates, low customer service scores, lower productivity and higher absenteeism, yet when I ask about employee engagement, they seem to say their annual satisfaction scores are high. This leads me to ask, what are they really measuring? It’s clear that it’s not enough to just replace the language in an annual employee survey and call it and ‘engagement tool’. It’s also clear that all ‘perks’ are not the same.
The research shows that even though, people may have really demanding, stressful jobs, where work hours are long and they are expected to look at emails all the time, that stress is managed well when the employee is fully engaged.
How do you really affect employee engagement?
1) Firstly, management must take responsibility beyond just an annual question or two in a survey. Starting from the CEO down, it’s cultural and you ultimately need management and leaders to possess ALL 5 of the following. They must be:
· Motivators
· Assertive
· Accepting of accountability
· Relationship builders
· Decision makers
· Sincerely invested in the well being of their team – here we are talking about sharing, caring, teaching, coaching and appreciating their employees.
2) All perks are not the same. The most effective perk for employees is ‘flex time’. Offering opportunity for an employee to work around their personal life, drive significant positive scores when it comes to employee engagement.
In the end, here’s to engaged employees, caring management and a corporate culture that values the person doing the work, just as much as the product they produce.