Employee Engagement is people performing at their best, showing want-to levels of performance, and choosing to give their best efforts.
Organizational Excellence is only possible when employees at all levels are fully engaged in driving business performance. Elevating engagement requires a shift in the culture. Just like a lack of engagement is a product of the culture, so too is high employee engagement.
But what are the keys to fostering engagement?
Establish a Common Understanding of What it Means to be Engaged
Organizations first need to define what they mean by engagement. What will employees at all levels of the organization do and say to demonstrate their engagement? What won’t they do and say if they are fully engaged? How can their behavior support the organization’s vision, mission, and values?
Once engagement has been defined, the organization needs to establish a collective understanding of what it is looking for so that the expectations are clear to the entire workforce.
Turning Expectations into Action
Engaged employees typically feel like their work matters—that their work is contributing to the greater good of the company. Engagement cannot be forced. Leaders need to talk about the impact of employees’ work. They need to provide positive reinforcement for the behaviors and effort they want more of. They also must model the behaviors themselves. Engaged frontline employees and contractors require engaged leaders.
Leaders need to provide resources and remove barriers to enable the workforce to be efficient and productive. They also must directly provide positive reinforcement for the critical behaviors through their words and actions. It is easier for employees to feel good about their work when their good work is recognized and nurtured. Dr. Aubrey C. Daniels summed up a leader’s role in building engagement in the “Thank God It’s Monday” chapter of his best-selling book, Bringing Out the Best in People: “Use every opportunity to show, through your actions and attention, that high performance pays off.”
Yet reinforcement from leaders is not enough. Organizational systems, work processes, and the work itself should work in unison to support an engaged workforce. The work environment should ensure their physical and psychological safety.
ADI Can Help
While engagement surveys are common, ADI goes beyond assessing engagement levels. We help clients implement step-by-step strategies to build and sustain workforce engagement. Equally important, we ensure that engagement is focused on the business issues that matter most.
Having everyone in an organization working in concert, sharing their ideas and focusing their discretionary effort on making the business successful, not only drives improvement, it creates an inclusive, energetic culture that attracts and retains talent.
