In last week’s blog we outlined the avenues for improvement that Gallup recommend for increasing employee engagement. According to their research, Gallup’s knows that factors such as EPS, profitability, productivity, and customer ratings are all key indicators in determining an organisation’s health and its potential for growth. These factors are also significantly impacted by engagement levels.
It is clear that concentrating on employee engagement can help an organisation withstand, and potentially even thrive in challenging economic times.
Choose The Right People For The Right Job, And Then Some
Finding the right employees and managers is imperative to any organisation’s financial outcomes. It is essential to select individuals who have the potential to be top performers. However, the success of every organisation also hinges on hiring and promoting employees with the talent to boost employee engagement.
It is not enough to put the right people in the right jobs. Every organisation must invest in their employees’ greatest talents to optimise their performance. Gallup’s research indicates that the key to your success, as an HR Professional, and as an organisation, lies in identifying employees’ unique strengths and then building on them to help your employees achieve their full potential.
The individuals that companies name as manager is also one of the most important decisions they make, given that managers play a critical role in driving engagement in any organisation. Whether hiring from the outside or promoting from within, organisations that scientifically select managers for the unique talents it takes to effectively manage others, will greatly enhance the odds of employee engagement.
Gallup recommends that instead of using management jobs as promotional prizes for all career paths, companies should treat them as unique roles with distinct functional demands that require a specific talent set. The reality is that many people who are the best performers in their current roles do not have the talents necessary to effectively manage people, however, the standard process within most workplaces is for these individuals to be promoted to managers anyway.
At the end of the day, engagement is all about people. Therefore, it is imperative for leaders to devise selection strategies with the goal of accelerating employee engagement across the board. This starts with using objective selection criteria to ensure that companies hire and promote managers with the talent to lead and engage their workgroups.
This is because great managers value and invest in talent. With an eye for what individuals around them do well, they position people in the most appropriate areas or tasks that will harness their greatest strengths. This results in an increased ability for individuals to say that they have been given an opportunity to do what they do best.
Gallup's research proves that employees’ perceptions of their primary manager influence about 70% of their engagement, while coworkers’ attitudes and other factors account for the remaining 30%. Therefore, once an organisation puts the right managers in place, the next step to strategically boosting overall engagement is to select the right employees.
In most organisations, a few key employees stand out for their ability to foster workplace engagement. They energise and influence others with their commitment to achieving organisational and team objectives.
Invest in Employee Strengths and Well-Being
Investing in employee selection, strengths, and well-being has the power to boost the results companies would receive from increasing engagement alone.
Employees who are engaged in their jobs are generally in better health and have healthier habits than employees who are not engaged or are actively disengaged:
- Engaged employees lead healthier lives.
- “Thriving” employees have lower healthcare costs.
- The highest-performing managers find ways to improve employees’ lives.
- Engaged and thriving employees are resilient and agile.
The manager’s role in improving employee engagement and well-being should not be understated, nor underestimated. One of Gallup's key drivers for increasing employee engagement is to make well-being an organisational strategy, much like other organisational outcomes. Such a strategy should then be an embedded responsibility (with accountability) for managers to facilitate. How that might look in action is outlined below:
- Communicate a commitment to well-being consistently in all of the programs the company offers.
- Hold leaders accountable for well-being programs available to employees.
- Consider how to embed activities to increase well-being in individual development plans and goals.
- Set positive defaults for making healthy choices.
- Link employee engagement to customer growth.
Think Beyond The Balance Sheet
When leaders follow the guiding principles outlined above, their companies have the potential to make substantial inroads to improving employee well-being and subsequently their levels of engagement. Given the existing teams, structure, departments, and social networks they can use to help effect change, organisations are in a unique position to make a real difference in the lives of employees, their families, and their communities.
As organisations transform their workplaces through employee engagement, Gallup cautions leaders to remember the process is not an end in itself. It is imperative for leadership to harness the power of an engaged workforce in a productive, purposeful way to get the most from every employee. A critical place to start is with the customer. Great leaders know that the best way to get their customers engaged and spending more is to ensure that their employees are engaged and aligned with their brand promise.
Optimising the emotional connection between employees and customers really does need to be central to what leaders and managers think about every day. A lack of focus on this connection, means missed opportunities to maximise employees’ efforts. This will quickly result in missed opportunities with customers or prospects, inhibiting organisational growth. Despite what companies stand to gain, Gallup often finds that they struggle to connect engaged employees’ actions into an engaging experience for their customers, and the issue is usually that employee behaviors are not aligned with the company’s brand.
Next week we will explore the ways in which to improve the customer experience through a commitment to increasing employee engagement.
If you've missed any of the previous engagement posts in this series, you can read them here:
Employee Engagement: The Holy Grail
Employee Engagement: Definitions
Employee Engagement: What Is It Really About?
Credit: The image used in this blog is taken from Galllup's State Of The Global Workforce Report 2013.
