“Engagement” can be a nebulous concept, so if you’re not convinced that engagement is important enough to devote time and attention to, check out this article. But if you already recognize the link between employee engagement and resilience, innovation, productivity, retention, and revenue, the next challenge is understanding what makes a workplace or a job engaging. That’s what we’ll cover in this article.
What Is Engagement?
In the article linked above, we used the US Office of Personnel Management’s definition of engagement: “An employee’s sense of purpose that is evident in their display of dedication, persistence and effort in their work or overall attachment to their organization and its mission.” Engaged employees are better employees, and better employees make for better businesses. How, then, do we create the kind of workplace where employees derive a sense of purpose from their work and align themselves with an organization’s mission?
Key Drivers
Useful feedback: Change this title. Employees need to know what they’re doing well and where they need to grow, and they need to receive this feedback in a supportive way that also lays out the consequences of failure.
Sense of competence: Employees are more engaged when they feel like they are good at their jobs. This sense can be real or perceived. A competent employee can feel incompetent if they receive frequent negative feedback with no constructive component or opportunity to learn how to complete a task successfully. Feeling incompetent leads to frustration, which can ultimately result in learned helplessness. If you’ve ever seen a child struggle with math homework (or any homework) and then give up on even trying, saying, “I’m just bad at math,” you’ve seen learned helplessness in action.
Professional development: Fulfillment is a natural outgrowth of competence. Professional development programs drive competence, providing employees with new skills while reinforcing existing skills. Access to professional development has the added effect of making employees feel valued.
Sense of fairness: “People don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses”: it’s one of those clichés that became a cliché because it is so true. We often say that leaders have to live their values and embody the kind of culture they want to see in the workplace. This attitude has to filter to every level. When employees see their coworkers getting preferential treatment, taking credit for the work of others, or not doing their share in a team effort, the workplace can start to feel unfair. Feeling as though the workplace is unfair is another driver of learned helplessness: “No matter what I do, I’ll never get ahead because other people get preferential treatment and I never get recognition for my work, so I’m not even going to try.”
Work/life balance: At a time where some business leaders are pushing to dispose of the concept altogether, work/life balance is still vital to the health of employees and to the satisfaction they derive from their work. Engaged employees might have a different concept of work/life balance, preferring to work longer hours because they truly love what they do, but no matter how much you love your job, there comes a point where more hours don’t translate to effective productivity.
Challenges
Setting clear goals: At every level of the business, your goals have to be clear and achievable. That includes your long-term strategic goals, a team’s goals for a project, and an individual employee’s goals for a particular task. Good goals are SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Employees who are told they are failing at things they didn’t even know they were supposed to be doing will quickly disengage, but well-defined goals provide a contract of sorts, where employees understand what is expected of them. If they fail to meet expectations, they understand why, making criticism easier to take while providing a clear path for improvement.
Measuring the success of engagement strategy: A lack of engagement is rarely observed directly, but it is evident in its symptoms. Lower productivity, lower quality output, more mistakes, absenteeism, and high turnover are all signs that employees might be feeling disengaged from their work.
First understand which symptoms of disengagement you’re seeing, and then implement a strategy for addressing them. If you’re seeing high turnover, analyze your exit interviews for signals as to why employees are quitting. Are they leaving for bigger challenges? Implement an employee development program. Is work/life balance an issue? Offer flexible or hybrid work schedules and focus more on results and performance than time spent at the desk. Only by correctly identifying the problem can you accurately measure your attempts to solve it.
Measuring individual engagement levels: Engagement doesn’t look the same in all employees. Employees who keep to themselves or don’t seem outwardly happy to be at work might be deeply engaged in their work and invested in their company’s success, while an employee who volunteers for everything and is the friendliest person in the office might be checked out and skating by on the bare minimum. You can gauge engagement through annual or semi-annual surveys of their job satisfaction, their pride in their work, their work/life balance, and their emotional wellbeing. Simply doing this alone can boost engagement as employees will recognize that their employer cares about their wellbeing.
Solutions for Every Business
Engagement can be hard to measure and diagnose, but the measures taken to foster engagement will help any workplace thrive, even ones that don’t have issues with disengaged employees. Making the key drivers listed above an integral part of your culture will help you avoid the problems of disengagement before they start. That’s the great thing about many of the suggestions you’ll find on this blog: they’ll help you diagnose and treat many common business issues, but they’ll also help a business already running smoothly reach the next level.
