Are your employees engaged?  There have been numerous studies, articles, research and publications on Employee Engagement. Within the U.S. workforce, the Gallup organization reports of costs of over $300 billion to the bottom line in loss productivity. That’s a pretty serious number. How do you think your organization is doing with employee engagement? I would recommend that you evaluate this issue before your organizations bottom line adds to the over $300 billion dollar loss.Defining and Measuring Employee Engagement

Gallup identifies some core elements of employee engagement:

  • I know what is expected of me at work.
  • I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
  • At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
  • In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
  • My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
  • There is someone at work who encourages my development.
  • At work, my opinions seem to count.
  • The mission or purpose of my organization makes me feel my job is important.
  • My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
  • I have a best friend at work.
  • In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
  • This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

What’s interesting about employee engagement is that there are a myriad of definitions and opinions about what it actually is. I find Gallup’s core elements to be great self identifiers for an employee to “feel engaged,” but when you look further at the subject many others take a more organizational level approach.

For instance, Kevin Kruse, author of Employee Engagement 2.0, had a really interesting article in Forbes last year and defined employee engagement as the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals. He was also is very clear that employee engagement does not mean employee happiness or employee satisfaction. Kevin makes some interesting points that happy or satisfied employees don’t always work hard or put in extra effort on behalf of organizations, but that emotionally engaged employees care about their work and strive to meet their organization’s goals and objections.

Similarly to Gallop, Kevin Kruse used quantitative data to show the importance of employee engagement to an organization’s bottom line.  He used research from Towers Watson which found that companies with engaged workers have six percent higher net profit margins, and according to Kenexa engaged companies have five times higher shareholder returns over five years.

I often find parallels with employee emotional engagement with my 16 year old daughter.  When I’m “encouraging” her to do something or explaining something to her, I often find that she’s going about the ‘mechanics’ of the task, but that she’s checked out, as my husband will say, she’s shut down.  Now, you could blame this on being  teenager, but relating that to your workforce, when’s the last time you were trying to involve an employee on a project or assignment, and found that they were walking through the steps, but weren’t there…emotionally.

So what does this tell us? Well for me, obviously I have a bumpy ride as my daughter still has a few years before college and my son is getting ready to turn 15.  But personal parenting issues aside, as business professionals we must find ways to evaluate how engaged our employees really are and ways to further engage them in an organization’s mission.

My next blog posting will delve into some strategies to further engage your employees, so stay tuned!