28/07/2017

It is a common misconception that the happier your employees, the more engaged they are. But real employee engagement is so much more. 

It is how your team members feel about their role and the contribution they make to your business. It is about how they want to come to work, interact with colleagues and customers and make a positive difference. It is how they feel trusted, empowered and confident to do their job well and how they can go on to challenge, improve and innovate regardless of their job level or remit.

They might not always be full of the joys of spring as they do this – they may even be a little frustrated or challenging at times – but ultimately they are invested in your business, want to see it succeed and want to be part of it. Apathy it is not.

Now don’t get us wrong – both engaged and happy employees should be something every employer strives for. The reasons why are pretty powerful (for more see the link to our infographic below).

• Competitive Advantage: 94% of the world’s most admired companies believe their efforts to engage employees creates competitive advantage (Hay)
• Customer Service: 70% of engaged employees indicate they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs while only 17% of non-engaged employees say the same (Engage for Success)
• Health: Engaged UK employees take an average 2.7 sick days per year, while disengaged take 6.2 days (CIPD)
• Creativity: 59% of engaged employees say work brings out their most creative ideas. Only 3% of disengaged employees agree (Gallup)
• Economics: The Department for Business, Innovations & Skills (now part of Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy) calculated that disengaged employees annually cost the UK economy as much as £64bn

Setting the conditions

So what can you do to better understand and improve employee engagement in your organisation? Well for us, it is important to understand that building good employee engagement isn’t a quick or easy fix.

Indeed, there are many cogs that make this particular wheel turn such as effective leadership and management, a good understanding of your organisational purpose and vision, strong values and behaviours, trust and the opportunity for people to develop and use new skills. So despite the cog analogy, it isn’t simply a mechanistic approach.

By taking the opportunity to understand what engagement looks like and how it relates to your organisation, you can start making some positive changes that set and test the conditions you need to achieve it.

It means you’ll be open to and aware of all the smaller wins and how they will grow and accumulate to become big wins like better productivity, workplace wellbeing, innovation and overall business success.

Get Started

To help you find out more, we’ve pulled together various resources and links that explore employee engagement and how it can support your people and in turn performance.

• Listen to our podcast (below) as our Ambition Coaches explore Employee Engagement, sharing top tips and insight.
• Download our Why…Employee Engagement? slideshare for a quick overview and links to wider reading.
• Book one of our free breakfast events exploring key people management themes including employee engagement. You can search and book your place here.
• Download our Why... Employee Engagement? Infographic with key stats and top tips.
• Read our blog ‘Let’s get engaged! 5 Top Tips for Employee Engagement’.
• Take the opportunity to really explore your approach to employee engagement with a facilitated session or bespoke support. Find out more about our Ambition Programme.
• Read more about how we can help you to assess, develop and continuously improve with employee engagement consultant projects and surveys.

 

More from IDG

We hope you find all of these resources interesting and a good starting point for your organisation to explore employee engagement in more depth.

If you’d like to talk to us about your experiences in more detail and how to shape and get the most from your work to engage employees, we’d love to hear from you.

Whether specific employee engagement consultant services, leadership consultancy or wider work culture and people development consultancy, we can help. You can also talk to us as employee engagement survey providers too.

Interested in more people management themes? Visit our news pages and select our ‘Why Series’ tag for more resources or follow us @i_dg or Linkedin for all the latest updates.

 

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