This is part two of a three-part series on employee engagement. Click here to read part one or here to skip to part three.
So far, you’ve learned why it is important to not only understand your customers and what drives their behaviors, but also to understand your employees and what drives their engagement. There are three tenets of employee engagement that you should consider when focusing on strengthening your employees’ relationships with your organization. The first pillar of engagement, Motivation, was explained in part one – relating to trust, inclusiveness, and fulfilling other basic needs.
The second pillar is that highly engaged employees are Able.
Just like with motivation, there are both internal and external factors that contribute to an employee’s ability to perform their job. Internal factors would deal with the person having the right qualifications, knowledge base, and/or physical or mental capabilities to perform at a high level.
Assuming that employees meet these minimum requirements, or else they likely would not have been hired, our focus is on the external factors that you as an employer can control:
- Do my employees have right space needed to perform their work?
- Have I equipped my employees with the right tools to do their jobs?
- Are my employees trained to handle all aspects of their work?
- Is there a clear point of contact for employees to ask questions?
- Is there a concrete chain of command in place to help employees escalate issues as needed?
Some of these factors are environmental. A job that requires long periods of analytical thinking may be hard to do in an open-concept office space where there are a lot of interactions and conversations happening all around them. Just like a job that requires a lot of computer processing time would be difficult to perform with older computers that do not have the necessary processing speed.
Other factors that strongly affect engagement tend to deal with training programs. Employees that did not receive the proper training and/or are a part of an atmosphere that makes it uncomfortable to ask questions may find it difficult to do their best every day, thus are more likely to be weakly engaged.
Going beyond the initial onboarding, another attribute related to employee’s ability that LRC has found to consistently discriminate highly engaged from weakly engaged employee are having opportunities to learn and grow. Companies that encourage and facilitate personal and professional growth tend to have more highly engaged employees. In two recent engagement programs one with a large manufacturer and the other a business services company, overall employee engagement was weak – for both companies nearly 4 out of 10 employees were weakly engaged. A major commonality among employee evaluations of their respective company? Roughly two-thirds of employees had a very unfavorable view of their company’s training and development programs!
The first two pillars of employee engagement, being Motivated and Able, are necessary foundations of employee engagement. In order to begin to work toward a healthier, more engaged workforce, you must focus on how to motivate your employees and help them to be able to do their jobs. In the final part of this series, I’ll dive into the third pillar of highly engaged employees: Directed.
Interested in understanding if your employees are highly engaged or weakly engaged? Contact us for more information.