As numerous employee engagement surveys tell us, fewer than 20% of employees are engaged at work.  With so few employees engaged in companies today, how can employers turn this around and truly engage their workforce in the future?

As an experienced human capital professional that has been a student of employee engagement and its linkage to employee and company performance for an extensive period of time, I would like to share the following opinions about engaging employees to drive business results and build a performance-driven culture.   I believe it all starts with understanding what engagement means and then developing the strategies to engage your workforce. 

As defined by Julie Gebauer of Towers Perrin in her book titled, “Closing the Engagement Gap”, employee engagement is the deep and broad connection that employees have with a company and their voluntary and enthusiastic commitment to its success.  Full engagement exists when every employee works at the top of his or her game.  Can you imagine how successful companies would be if all of their employee were giving 120% for the company?  Wow!

So, what are my recommended strategies for achieving full engagement of your workforce?  The 5 strategies that companies need to employ to achieve full engagement are as follows:

1. Understand  what is meaningful to each employee
2. Educate individuals and teams on the vision and strategies of the company
3. Create an emotional connection between employees, customers and the company
4. Involve employees in running the business
5. Reward employees for the key drivers of profitable revenue growth

The following paragraphs amplify the 5 points above.

Understanding what is meaningful to each employee is critical to the success of a company’s engagement practices.  Managers need to take the time and figure out what is important to each individual and their team as a whole.  Why? Because knowing what each individual values is the starting place for capturing the minds and hearts of your team member and receiving their discretionary effort, which is key to driving business results and building a high-performance culture. 

Educating your workforce at all levels on the vision and strategies of the company is also critical to running a successful business.  Senior leadership needs to start translating the company’s vision and business strategies into actionable plans for their teams.  A company’s education efforts should include explaining how the company makes money and how to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace.   

Creating an emotional connection with employees is somewhat complicated.  So what is the magic juice to create an emotional connection with employees? The answer to this question is twofold.  First, managers need to be genuinely interested in the well-being and success of their employees.  Second, the leaders of the company need to inspire and build a sense of pride in every employee.  To build pride in every employee, companies need to run an outstanding business, grow great managers, and build a “brag-able” culture and company.

Involving employees should focus on making everyone an active participant instead of order takers.  You get committed employees when you value each person’s contribution to business success.  

Practices for rewarding employees need to evolve from traditional compensation practice like merit increases and after-the-fact bonuses to practices that engage and motivate employees to achieve the strategic goals of the company.  Rewards should be integrated with performance management practices to create a continuous real-time business process for coaching and recognizing employees. For more detailed information regarding cutting-edge rewards practices go to bit.ly/UltimateRewards.

I believe any company can continue to grow successfully on a global scale if they integrate innovative engagement strategies with their vision and business strategies.  In the coming weeks, I will be posting additional blogs that explain what companies, managers and human resources can do to improve employee engagement at any company.

Human Capital – Love it, do it, prove it!