Why should you care about employee engagement?
Your life as a business leader is likely hectic. You must deal with an array of problems crying for our attention, be it internal issues such as staffing, quality, and production problems or external matters like battling for the best talent, competitive pressures, and ever-changing governmental regulations, to name just a few. A significant threat to any organization is mostly unseen and unheard above the daily commotions. This very threat is often diminishing sales, profits, customer satisfaction, and often the pride in a job well done. The name of this threat is low employee engagement! The data
High employee engagement leads to a high-performance organization
on employee engagement are reliably shocking, however, most leaders have become numb to the statistics.
A recent Gallup report indicates that only 34% of employees are fully engaged with the company and organization they work for, while 13% are actively disengaged! The rest, a whopping 53% are disengaged or somewhat disengaged.
66% of employees are typically disengaged!
What makes a High-Engagement Culture so important?
According to the Gallup research paper: “Organizations and teams with higher employee engagement and lower active disengagement perform at higher levels. For example, organizations that are the best in engaging their employees to achieve earnings-per-share growth that is more than four times that of their competitors. Compared with business units in the bottom quartile, those in the top quartile of engagement realize substantially better customer engagement, higher productivity, better retention, fewer accidents, and 21% higher profitability. Engaged workers also report better health outcomes.
Who is responsible for employee engagement?
Employee engagement has its foundation in the culture of an organization. Here comes the sobering and potentially painful recognition for all of us in leadership positions: The culture of a company is what leadership makes it be or what leadership allows it to become! Consequently, employee engagement rests squarely on the shoulders at the top of the leadership pyramid.
What can you do?
To begin with there are 6 crucial steps to building a strong organizational culture:
- Creating an engaging vision showing the path into an exciting future with clarity.
- Defining a set of values everyone in the organization is expected to live by without compromise
- Developing a documented strategy with OKRs (Objectives & Key Results), related SMART goals, and a common understanding of the purpose of the company. This document will allow the leadership to generate a cohesive and consistent message to all stakeholders.
- Implementing structured communication patterns to assure that everyone, independent of rank, is always ”on the same page”, provides clarity of expectations, and focuses on performance.
- Introduce a system of “check-ins” which provide the basis for a continuous improvement process on every level.
- Employing a meaningful leadership development program to support all leaders to live up to their potential and set the right example for the organization. Growing leaders grow strong companies!
The workplace we create defines essentially how engaged someone is at work.
Do our people go home invigorated or disempowered at the end of a long day? Effective leaders should care deeply about engagement because of the untapped opportunity it presents. If we manage to harness the potential buried deep within the hearts of our people, we can transform employee engagement from a liability into a real, sustainable competitive advantage. Furthermore, we can potentially generate gains in productivity unseen since the industrial revolution! For many companies and organizations, employee engagement is the final hurdle to grow into a high-performance organization.
As Mark Miller so eloquently put it: All high-performance organizations have four things in common. They bet on leadership, they act as one, they win the heart, and they excel at execution. It all boils down to employee engagement!
Good luck and contact me should you have any questions. Looking for some help to get there? Contact us or set up a FREE call with certified business coach Manfred Gollent.
