Employee Engagement: How and Why.

Engaging an employee is beneficial to your business. An engaged team member has belief in your company and strives to reach team goals, they treat clients and customers well, represent your company well and are more likely to be retained by the business.

According to The Chartered Institute of Personal Development, employee engagement is “a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values and a willingness to help out colleagues.” More than just motivation and beyond job satisfaction, engagement has to be willingly offered to the company by the client, and it can not become so just because it is required from an employer.

Considering the employer / employee relationship the same as any other relationship – it all begins with communication. To engage an employee you must begin by talking to them. This may seem a fairly obvious statement, however it is necessary to make as corporations are often so fixated on meeting the expectations of external sources that they overlook the importance of the employee and the vital role that they playing building and maintaining brand standards.

For the case of employee engagement, it could be argued,

  
• The CIPD found that in 2006, 70% of engaged employees indicated that they had a good understanding of the company’s customer’s needs and how they should be met. Only 17% of non-engaged employees articulated the same confidence in their knowledge.
  
• In 2003 Gallup conducted a survey which found that 67% advocate the company / organisation to which they are a part of. Only a tiny 3% of disengaged employees do the same. Of the engaged employees, 78% would recommend the business’ products and services, compared to just 13% of the disengaged.
  
• According to a 2004 Corporate Leadership Council survey, engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their place of employment than those that are disengaged by a company. High turnover creates a significant cost for companies, with the cost of recruitment approximated equalling a year’s salary. Engagement would dramatically reduce this figure.
  
• In 2010 the CIPD went on to report that organisations are increasingly recognising the importance of their corporate brand. Engaged employees will acts as promoters for your organisation. This protects the company’s reputation from dissatisfied customers or clients.

Compelling evidence; better engaged employees are an effective method of improving your business’ performance. How do you go about achieving this?

Top Tips for Engaging Employees

  
1. Communicate. A real dialogue with staff can make a real difference. A two way conversation means not only listening to what your staff have to say, but also acting upon it.
  
2. It is crucial that staff understand how their work fits into the bigger picture of the business, so create a communications strategy that clearly explains the company’s vision, values and objectives. This will encourage staff to want to contribute to the achievement of company goals.
  
3. Make communication a face-to-face process as much as possible and include line managers. Employees appreciate being kept informed by their own managers. This gives the sense of a relationship.
  
4. Have an open narrative about where the business is going and its future achievements and the impact that their work will have on this process, plus the benefits that they will receive. Making this dialogue engaging is key to its success; graphs and flow charts are not accessible to everybody, but videos detailing illustrating personal stories of achievement will interest staff.
  
5. Make all communication interesting and focussed. Bombarding people with emails will be ignored by most. A content rich and informative intranet is a good way of keeping employees focussed if they have access to it. This may not be the best option for staff that spends the majority of their working hours away from a computer.
  
6. Campaign your messages properly. Give staff time to digest each message as overloading staff with too many different messages can have the opposite effect, as can management jargon!
  
7. Make sure that your communication remains consistent, don’t tell your employees one thing and then contradict it. And don’t tell one employee one message and then tell something else to another employee, as they are likely to share notes.
  
8. Tie your story together with external communications. Create a relationship of trust with your employees by releasing information to them before it is released to the public.
  
9. Honesty is important in all relationships so tell your staff the bad news as well as the good. If you are unable to give them the full picture then explain this to them and make it clear that you will keep them informed as and when you can.
  
10. Don’t assume that just because you are talking to staff that they are listening. Measure and evaluate the reaction that you get by asking for feedback.

For more information and advice on employment engagement and corporate branding visit BergHind Joseph (www.berghindjoseph.com). BergHind Joseph are B2B branding specialists based in London.