corporate culture | Project Success

It’s time to unpack Employee Engagement.

By now the benefits of having engaged employees – teams who come to work with their whole self and genuinely care about doing a good job – should be nothing new to you. But just in case they are, here’s a taste:

Highly engaged employees take 41% fewer sick days. They have 21% higher productivity, and 17% higher sales. They make 17% fewer mistakes. This is what the actual statistics say. Companies with the majority of highly engaged employees earn on average twice the revenue of companies whose employees drag their feet on the way to work.

And it makes sense, doesn’t it? If your team is dragging their feet on their way to work, then dragging their feet while they perform their work, they are not getting as much done as they could. They are not happy, and that unhappiness has a big impact on your results as a leader.

But employee engagement goes deeper than that – much deeper. In fact, part of what I am about to show you is that by creating a workplace that enables a high engagement in your staff, you are actually doing something more meaningful than increasing your profit (although that is definitely nice). You’re doing a public service, and improving the community around which you work. You’re bringing happiness by reducing the effects caused by many workplaces like depression, anxiety and fatigue. By improving your people, you’re improving the community, and by improving the community you’re improving the broader world around you.

In creating a workplace that has engaged employees, you are bringing meaning to your people’s work. Given that we spend the majority of our time at work (apart from sleeping), you are now giving meaning to their life. In giving meaning to a person’s life, you are meeting more of their basic and enhanced needs that, according to Maslow, bring happiness. In bringing happiness you are reducing things like depression. You’re reducing illness, as happy people have been proven to get sick less often (41% less often, actually).

Continue reading A Simple (Yet Powerful) Framework for Employee Engagement →

Employee Engagement Research & Sources

If you’ve read any form of leadership literature over the past year there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the epidemic that is sweeping the globe, and has been for some time. No country is safe – whether it is a first world country with all the benefits a person could want, or a third world country where workers are truly exploited.

That epidemic is employee engagement.

Low engagement across the world in what should be a meaningful endeavor – work, has strangled productivity and is robbing employees around the world of their energy and happiness. You see, it’s only in the last 100 years that work has really been separate from the management and planning. And that separation has led to meaningless work, separated from the customers who benefit or the outcomes they produce.

Now more than 70% of employees, even in first world countries, are disengaged in their work.

I’ve put together a manifesto with a clear step-by-step guide to improving employee engagement, and below are the sources for research that all point to the same thing: We crave clarity, regular checking in from our leaders where they focus on our strengths, and continuous improvement, and despite what you may have experienced the meaning we can get from normal every day jobs runs very deep.

Let’s check it out!

The State of the Global Workplace, Gallup
Growth Mindset
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Hertzberg’s Two Factor Theory
Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world
High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being
Eustress versus Distress
Harvard Forces of Employee Engagement
Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation
SWOT Analysis For Management Consulting (Albert Humphrey)
Do Employees Really Know What’s Expected of Them? Gallup
The Million Dollar Checklist: Sustaining reductions in catheter related bloodstream infections
The Person and the Situation – effects of environment on motivation
Universal and Cultural Dimensions of Optimal Experiences
Motivating Language Theory
The Art of Motivating Employees
Driving Engagement by Focusing on Strengths
Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance
Harvard, The Easiest Way To Change People’s Behavior
Timing Matters: The Impact of Immediate and Delayed Feedback on Learning
The Power of Feedback
Google’s research on Clarity and Meaning