The Engaged Employee

This is not an article about employees about to get married, but that old nugget
about getting employees integrated into the business mission. Here is a business
colleague Sean Mc Pheat's thoughts on the matter.

Many managers struggle to get their employees to be engaged with their
jobs. Comments range from “I just can’t motivate them” to
“They’re only here for the money” to “No-one wants to work these
days”.

Engagement for many is the Holy Grail, the pinnacle of team member
involvement. But how can we get people to actually want to bring their
creativity, their passion, their talent to work and really make a
difference?

According to the CIPD’s latest quarterly Employee Outlook survey, the
UK’s workforce is a “nation of employees who are simply ‘not
bothered’ about their work”, with 58% of respondents reporting only
‘neutral’ levels of engagement with their job.

Peter Cheese, chief executive at the CIPD, drew links between employee
disengagement and recent high profile cases of “unethical behaviours and
corrosive cultures overseen by senior leaders”, emphasising the
importance of establishing positive working cultures from the top down. He
went on to warn:

“We know that strong employee engagement drives higher productivity and
better business outcomes, so such a prominent display of ‘neutral
engagement’ in the workplace should act as a real wake up call for
employers.”

The survey also showed a clear link between levels of engagement at work
and more general well-being outside it. Engaged employees scored much
higher on questions relating to life satisfaction, happiness and how
worthwhile life is, also reporting much lower levels of anxiety than their
neutrally engaged or disengaged colleagues.

The impact of good leadership on employee satisfaction was also
interesting, with a clear correlation between high levels of trust in
senior managers and lower than average levels of anxiety. Employees who
agreed or strongly agreed that they felt properly consulted on important
decisions had much higher levels of well-being than those who felt
side-lined. Quite simply, as Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the
CIPD put it:

“How people are managed on a day to day basis is central to their
well-being beyond the workplace.”

So, as I have said before, managing people is not going to get the results
you require. Only by showing leadership of your people will they respond to
your ideas and concern for results.