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 →