Are Your Employees M.A.D.? Part 1 of a 3 Part Series on Employee Engagement

In almost every industry publication, it is likely that you’ve seen a lot about employee engagement recently. It’s becoming a new buzzword that has attracted a lot of attention. And it’s about time!

Understanding your customers’ behaviors is critical to a business’ success. At LRC, we believe it so much that it is part of our mission statement. The customer experience, which drives those behaviors, is often influenced by interactions with its employees, and especially in B2B companies. This means understanding and engaging your employees are equally as critical.

Motivational speaker and TED talker extraordinaire, Simon Sinek, tweeted: “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” I couldn’t agree more.

Highly engaged employees are more strongly committed to an organization’s success, which can be seen in their passion and productivity. They are more likely to recommend the organization, which can be powerful in recruiting top-tier talent. They are also more likely to remain at the organization, which reduces turnover and the cost of recruiting and training new employees. In a recent Employee Engagement program LRC conducted, only 1 out of 10 weakly engaged employees were likely to remain with the organization over the next year.

So then, what drives an employee to be highly engaged versus one that is weakly engaged?

In this three-part series on Employee Engagement, I’ll explore the three pillars of highly engaged employees (Motivated, Able, Directed) that LRC has found in our 20 years of conducting Employee Engagement programs across a myriad of industries.

The first pillar is that highly engaged employees are Motivated.

Motivated employees bring passion and productivity to their work day in and day out. They are the people that are the most highly committed to the organization and its goals. Workplace motivation comes from both extrinsic and intrinsic factors. While intrinsic factors can’t necessarily be controlled by leaders within an organization; extrinsic factors certainly can be.

Over time, LRC has found several factors that consistently discriminate highly engaged from weakly engaged employees. Some of these include:

  • The work itself being interesting and enjoyable
  • Being compensated fairly
  • Feeling secure in the job
  • The perception that colleagues are committed to quality work
  • Having a manager that cares
  • Having someone that encourages your development
  • Having been recently praised
  • Having a best friend at work

While there are certainly other factors that can contribute to motivated or unmotivated employees, LRC has found that one or more of these have consistently been strong discriminators of employee engagement.

For instance, in a recent study, we found our client’s employee engagement was weak.  Delving into the data, trust in the company received low scores.  The management team understood – in light of their recent acquisition, financial difficulties had been brought to light and there had been reductions in staff.  It became an important part of their strategy, moving forward, to clearly communicate their plans and documented growth post-acquisition to assuage remaining fears.

In the next part of this series on employee engagement, I’ll look that the second pillar of highly engaged employees, being Able.

 


Interested in understanding if your employees are highly engaged or weakly engaged?  Contact us for more information.

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