What is employee engagement?
Employee Engagement is people performing at their best, showing want-to levels of performance, and choosing to give their best efforts aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives and values.
Why do some employees become disengaged?
Lack of employee engagement is a leadership problem. That is evident in the common causes of a disengaged workforce. Here are only a few of the reasons employees can become disengaged:
- What is expected of them is not clear or changes too haphazardly.
- They feel like their work is meaningless or unappreciated.
- They don’t get any meaningful positive feedback on their work.
- Their ideals and values are not aligned with those of their employer.
- The work culture is dominated by negative reinforcement and blame.
- Work processes and management practices are barriers to working efficiently.
What are the keys to fostering employee 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 show 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?
After defining engagement, the organization needs to establish a collective understanding of what it is looking for so that those expectations are clear to the entire workforce.
Turn 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 need engaged leaders. Leaders need to provide resources and remove barriers to enable the workforce to be efficient and productive. They also must provide positive reinforcement for critical workforce 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 all support an engaged workforce, with the work environment itself ensuring employees’ physical and psychological safety.
How does ADI help organizations foster employee engagement?
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.
ADI helps organizations implement step-by-step strategies to build and sustain workforce engagement. We ensure that engagement is focused on the business issues that matter most.
ADI’s Behavioral Leadership implementation process provides a systematic approach to fostering this engagement. It assesses the current state of engagement in your organization while identifying and correcting any behavioral disconnects in your systems, processes, and management processes that are suppressing engagement. It then defines the behaviors you expect to see from engaged leaders and frontline employees. Finally, it prepares your leaders to implement a positive and cascaded accountability system to ensure that those behaviors are motivated and sustained.
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.
Looking to build engagement in safety? Visit our Safety Engagement page.
