Employee Engagement 101: You Spoke, I Listened

The top three Google searches related to employee engagement are meaning, importance, and strategies.  In an effort to provide thought leadership around this topic, I sat down with GroSum, a performance management software firm, to share my philosophies and thinking.

Q:  What does employee engagement mean to you?
A:  Engagement occurs when workers trust leaders and feel an emotional connection to the organization – the same way they did their first day on the job.  Your employees go to work every day and they have a choice: to do what they have to do to get by or to give you 110% effort.  When your employees are engaged, they give you blood, sweat and tears, and it will show up in your bottom line results.

Q:  Why is employee engagement important?
A:  Lots of data exists which shows the correlation between profitable revenue growth and employee engagement.  Companies in the top tier of employee engagement outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share and have a 90 percent better growth trend than their competition.  The benefits of having engaged workers are vast and go well beyond bottom-line results.

Engaged workers also:

• Provide better customer service;
• Stay longer;
• Make fewer mistakes;
• Recommend your company as a great employer to their family and friends;
• Have fewer safety incidents;
• Are more productive and absent less; and
• Are more creative.

Q:  What are the common causes of employee disengagement?
A:  Employees disengage because their spirit gets chipped away over time in the work environment. Every person who you hired started out engaged, but little by little they began to check out and not care. Common causes of employee disengagement are poor communication, bad managers, boredom, not understanding how what I do every day adds value, poor relationships with coworkers, and lack of confidence in leadership.

Q:  What are some strategies to re-engage employees?
A:  Read my blog throughout April, as each week we will focus on one of my four strategies to increase employee engagement and bottom-line results.  You won’t want to miss these simple tips and ideas that you can act on immediately.  The result?  You’ll create an environment that people (yes, even your Millennials) can’t imagine leaving.  Imagine that.

Jill Christensen is an employee engagement expert, best-selling author, and international keynote speaker. She is a 2017 Top 100 Global Employee Engagement Influencer, authored the best-selling book, If Not You, Who? Cracking the Code of Employee Disengagement, and works with the best and brightest global leaders to improve productivity and retention, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth. Jill can be reached at +1.303.999.9224 or  jill@jillchristensenintl.com.