What is the key to boosting important metrics — like revenue and retention — across the board? Where should you invest your resources to see the biggest return? For the answer, look no further than your most important asset. The backbone of your business. Your employees.
Cultivating a culture of employee engagement is one of the most effective ways to grow your business and boost your bottom line. By maximizing the talent potential of your team through engagement efforts, you lower your risk of turnover, boost customer satisfaction, and increase your company’s overall success.
An important step in realizing these incredible benefits is understanding what employee engagement is — and what it isn’t.
What is Employee Engagement?
First, let’s clear up a common misconception holding you back from a truly engaged workforce: Employee engagement isn’t job satisfaction. An employee can be satisfied with a job without being engaged. The factors that affect satisfaction involve meeting an employee’s basic needs and wants. Things like pay, benefits, supervision, working conditions and job security all lead to increased satisfaction, but these are not the factors that motivate increased engagement and productivity. Job satisfaction is very important; but it only provides a baseline for building a deeper level of passion and commitment.
Employee satisfaction is the minimum entry fee that needs to be met in order for an employee to be fully engaged.
Recognizing engagement
Highly engaged workers are rare, making up only 13% of the workforce worldwide. It’s important to recognize engagement behaviors so you can foster an environment where they are encouraged to spread, or they will remain a rarity. There are three levels of engagement in employees:
- Engaged – Engaged employees are highly motivated and willing to go the extra mile. You might see them helping fellow employees, sharing ideas for growth and advocating for your business to their network. This group is a great resource for helping to foster engagement behaviors in their co-workers.
- Not Engaged – Non-engaged employees do what they need to get by, but they are not working with passion. These employees may be competent and even have high job satisfaction, but they are not contributing to business growth, only business survival. This group has the highest potential to become engaged, if given the right motivation.
- Actively Disengaged – Actively disengaged employees are not just unhappy at work, they are actively acting out their unhappiness and spreading discontent. This group has the potential to reverse the progress of engagement efforts and undermine the accomplishments of their more highly engaged co-workers.
Understanding Employee Engagement
Understanding engagement and being able to recognize the related behaviors in your workforce is a great first step to cultivating a culture of engagement — an environment where your employees share your passion and work hard to achieve your shared goals.
The Employee Engagement specialists at GO2 Partners have worked with large and small businesses in a variety of industries to overcome engagement challenges. If you have any questions, or you’re ready to start experiencing the benefits of a highly engaged workforce, we’re here to help.
