Employee Engagement with Work

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Ken Abrams, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

Employee engagement is golden. “Engagement,” is the willingness of an employee to go the extra mile to help his or her company succeed.
In a survey of 90,000 workers in 18 countries That’s the key finding of the Towers Perrin Global Workforce survey that found that companies with the highest level of employee engagement achieve better financial results and are more successful in retaining their most valued employees than companies with lower levels of engagement. Those companies with the highest percentage of engaged workers increased operating income 19% and earnings per share 28% year to year, while those with the lowest showed declines of 33% in operating income and 11% in earnings per share.
Many Workers are Disengaged Employee engagement is good for business, but unfortunately, fewer than a quarter of workers are engaged and more than a third are partly to fully disengaged. To calculate employees’ level of engagement, the survey measured employees’ emotional connection with their companies and jobs, what they thought about their work and how they performed.
This think/feel/act methodology revealed:
• Engaged: 21 percent of workers are fully engaged in their work. These workers scored very high in all three measures of engagement.
• Enrolled: 41 percent are partly engaged. Scores were high in the think and act categories, but lower in emotional connection. Enrolled workers complete their work but aren’t connected to it and thus aren’t going the “extra mile.” Employee Engagement with Work
• Disenchanted: 30 percent of workers scored lower in all three areas, but dramatically lower in their emotional connection with work.
• Disengaged: 8 percent are disconnected from work.
Closing the Gap Towers Perrin concludes that the numbers reflect a gap between what companies need in order to meet their goals, what workers give and companies’ effectiveness in channeling employee effort.
However, the survey also found that senior leadership has a significant impact on employee engagement. The top driver of that engagement was the belief that senior management had workers’ best interests at heart. Unfortunately, only 10 percent believed that was true. More than half of the respondents felt that managers treated them as if they didn’t matter.
To close the engagement gap, managers might try:
1. Communicating the benefits of engagement. The survey reported that employees are eager to invest more of themselves to help the company succeed, but they want to understand how their efforts will benefit them.
2. Showing that they care about and value employees. Companies need to understand their workers as well as their customers, and then design an environment that reflects that understanding.
3. Emotionally connecting with, and inspiring, their workforce. Recognize employees’ untapped energy and ambition, and then channel it in ways that yield real results. While the survey revealed that the above behaviors are rare among management, adopting them could make a key difference to a company’s bottom line