Employee engagement is more than a plus, it’s essential

by Janice Allen
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By Chris Witt, Vice President and General Manager, Portfolio Solutions at Tektronix. Chris lives in Portland, Oregon.

More than half a century of research has shown a strong link between employee engagement and company prosperity. The benefits of increasing your employee engagement include higher productivity, improved performance, reduced turnover, better hiring success and even higher earnings per share (EPS).

My experience confirms many of these benefits. Spend enough time at each company and you’ll feel it. When I first joined my company nine years ago, I felt something wasn’t right. Team cohesion was strong, but trust and commitment were low.

It took me time to restore confidence, purpose and enthusiasm in my team. I believe that through conscious action, everyone can improve employee engagement and help transform a work environment into a thriving business where the team is energized and engaged.

Employee engagement

Employee engagement is a measure of how committed employees are to the company, including how committed they are to its goals and principles.

Gallup has been measuring US employee engagement for decades. The percentage of engaged employees rose to 36% in 2020, but has been declining ever since. Gallup report in 2022 states that “32% of full- and part-time employees working for organizations are now engaged, while 17% are actively disengaged, an increase of one percentage point from last year.”

I see two lessons in those numbers. First, not only does it take an active effort to achieve employee engagement, but it also takes work to maintain it. Second, employee engagement begins with the company goals and principles to which they must commit.

Goals

To help with engagement, leaders must set goals, and it’s imperative that they communicate what those goals are to the rest of the company. This is not nearly as easy as it may sound.

Leaders need to come up with business goals that they have a legitimate expectation of achieving because the next step isn’t just communicating internally what those plans are; it justifies those plans.

Bluntly, it’s almost possible to inspire employees to commit to goals you can’t explain and don’t have a reasonable plan for achieving. That explanation should include how employees’ work relates to the company’s objectives. Implicit in all of this is how employee engagement should be a leadership priority. Business goals and business principles originate in leadership.

Principles

Employee engagement is likely to suffer if business objectives are not complemented by business principles. Call it what you like: company values, corporate culture, management style, but sticking to principles is critical in transforming a work environment.

I find that employees are more engaged when their contribution to the company is recognized and valued. It helps if these values ​​are explicitly stated. But if not explicit, the concepts should be inherent in your company’s stated principles. Furthermore, I believe that a company should have routine mechanisms in place to give recognition to employees.

All the research shows that agreeing to business principles is just as important as getting commitment to business goals. The involvement of employees in a company depends on the sum of their experiences with the company. People react not only to the way they are treated by management, but also by their colleagues.

Communication and dedication

The low engagement scores when I arrived at my company were both a clear call to action and an opportunity. Although our business had been through a difficult cycle, I saw that the outlook was excellent.

We have had many conversations with our employees about how to proceed. To make it even clearer, we deliberately asked our employees to think along about the problems we wanted to solve. Doing so can promote employee engagement. We worked to move the conversation from the past to the present and future, helping to center the discussion around tangible actions and improvement priorities.

You can use employee input to define team goals and priorities. By sharpening your focus, you can identify specific areas where you can deploy resources and innovate. Ask yourself how you can better serve your customers and remove the complexity from your internal processes.

In my case, when we started to explain and justify the plan, the employees started to agree. As employee engagement increased, we began to reap all the benefits the research promised: improved individual, team and company performance, including better financial results.

Digging In The Data

Surveys are great tools, but each tool has its limitations. A company’s ability to outperform the market depends on how well its teams are aligned. You just don’t get that from surveys. The lens to apply is, “What are we trying to do together and what does the research tell me?”

As employee engagement at my company improved, we saw groups whose scores lagged compared to the rest of the company. To see what was going on, we went straight to the point of impact. Listening to employees authentically helped us understand how we could improve. For some teams, the individuals felt disconnected from the company’s direction and strategy. Closer to the frontline, more work was needed to articulate ‘the why’ and discuss the challenges of change, such as friction and frustration.

We worked more on our communications and spent more time discussing tangible, actionable improvements to improve our messaging.

The process

To continue to see the benefits, you need to keep researching employee engagement from time to time. The same Gallup results I cited earlier show that it’s possible to lose employee engagement if it’s not a priority, even when things are positive. A constant focus is essential to keep engagement going.

The research is unequivocal. Employees with a sense of purpose and a high level of job satisfaction perform better than those who are not engaged. It’s a power multiplier to have a happy and engaged team. It is worth it.


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