A focus on: All things employee engagement

What is employee engagement? How does it work, where can you learn more about it and does it actually matter?

Every week I am contacted by internal communicators who are interested in knowing my thoughts about engagement and looking for information.

So I thought I’d collate everything I’ve published about it to date for you to rummage through. I’m going to point you towards resources and recommendations from people within my network, to enable you to grow your own and benefit from what’s around.

What is employee engagement?

I am a member of the social media group of Engage for Success movement (more on that in a moment) and I use the movement’s definitions:

“Employee engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being. This is about how we create the conditions in which employees offer more of their capability and potential.” (Tweet this)

e4swebsiteThere are differences between attitude, behaviour and outcomes in terms of engagement. An employee might feel pride and loyalty (attitude); be a great advocate of their company to clients, or go the extra mile to finish a piece of work (behaviour).

Outcomes may include lower accident rates, higher productivity, fewer conflicts, more innovation, lower numbers leaving and reduced sickness rates.

But all three – attitudes, behaviours and outcomes – are part of the engagement story. There is a virtuous circle when the pre-conditions of engagement are met when these three aspects of engagement trigger and reinforce one another.

Engaged organisations have strong and authentic values, with clear evidence of trust and fairness based on mutual respect, where two way promises and commitments – between employers and staff – are understood, and are fulfilled.  (Tweet this)

In 2012 Towers Watson consultancy surveyed 32,000 employees. Its Global Workforce study and found the traditional definition of engagement (the willingness of employees to voluntarily expend extra effort) to be no longer sufficient to fuel the highest levels of performance. The key word? Willing – which according to Towers Watson, does not guarantee able.

Read the whole report.

Below is a video on what employee engagement is:

What is Engage for Success?

Engage for Success is a movement committed to the idea that there is a better way to work, a better way to enable personal growth, organisational growth and ultimately growth for Britain by releasing more of the capability and potential of people at work.

It aims to grow awareness about the power and potential of employee engagement and provoke people to think and to learn more about it. Above all it wants individuals and organisations to take action, secure in the proof that it works and passionate about its importance.

For further information see the Engage for Success website and find them on Twitter @engage4success.

Tip: See #e4s on Twitter to discover tweets marked up by its community of supporters.

Engage for Success
also has The employee engagement global community via Google+

“Engagement isn’t something extra, it’s what you do and the way you do it” (Tweet this)

What are the four drivers of employee engagement?

I think the four drivers of employee engagement identified by Engage for Success are useful for internal communicators to familiarise themselves with:

  1. Strategic narrativeVisible, empowering leadership providing a strong strategic narrative about the organisation, where it’s come from and where it’s going
  2. Engaging managersEngaging managers who focus their people and give them scope, treat their people as individuals and coach and stretch them
  3. Employee voiceEmployee voice throughout the organisation, reinforcing and challenging views, between functions and externally. Employees seen as central to the solution
  4. IntegrityOrganisational integrity – values on the wall are reflected in day-to-day behaviours. There is no ‘say – do’ gap. (Tweet this)

Show me the evidence

engageforsuccessIn 2009 a comprehensive report: Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance Through Employee Engagement was written by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke (it’s known colloquially in the Comms and HR communities as The MacLeod report) and presented to Government.

It underlined the importance of employee engagement in having a direct benefit on the UK economy. If you have never read it before, do take a look.

How seriously is engagement taken? Well in 2012 there was an open letter to The Times newspaper published by senior leaders from 44 of some of the biggest organisations in the UK. They called for the nation to deliver £26 billion GDP growth by tapping into the potential of unengaged employees.

Those leaders included Marc Bolland, Marks & Spencer; Justin King, Sainsbury’s; Ronan Dunne, O2; and chair Win Bischoff, Lloyds Banking Group.

What information exists for communicators? Engage for Success has published an infographic and toolkit packed full of stats and useful information to help you understand who is doing what, and how engagement works in action.

You can access the toolkit here for free or see it below.

Further reading on my blog:

Every Monday Engage for Success publishes radio show at 4pm BST. There’s a listen again feature so you can catch up.

What do I read?

I enjoy reading articles by a number of communicators including David Zinger from Canada @davidzinger, and his employee engagement network. I’ve written about that network a number of times, it now has 6000+ members.

Blogs:

Who is doing what in other countries?
In May 2013 I went to Rome alongside David MacLeod to support the creation of ImpresAperta, the Italian equivalent of Engage for Success, and share information from the UK to help Italian communicators think through what is right for their organisations.

Read my article on launching the Italian version.

Finding other people who are interested in employee engagement

The official Engage for Success Twitter account has a number of lists where you can discover other people who are  tweeting about employee engagement:

Taskforce members
Social media team
Engage for Success core team
Members of the Engage for Success guru team

There are also lots of LinkedIn groups from Engage for Success.

I’m going to end this article by sharing some further resources that you can find on SlideShare. I hope you’ve found this article useful. Don’t forget I keep my Free resources page updated regularly and it’s full of information, articles and links to all sorts of info on internal communication, social media and much more.

Thanks as ever for stopping by

Rachel.

Post author: Rachel Miller.

Comments

  1. Jos says:

    What a great summary – thank you!

  2. Sian Weaver says:

    Hi Rachel, This is a great summary thanks for writing. Just started a new job and have been able to share the experiences I learnt about employee engagement from ECC (Lisa Sibley and Katie Hadgraft) so have just shared this on our employee engagement Yammer group. Also tried your ‘tweet this’ and very easy to use. Sian

  3. Thank you very much Sian. Congratulations on your new role and thank you for sharing on. Great to hear the Tweet this function works well too.

  4. Craig Althof says:

    Thank you, Rachel-extremely informative. For starters, I didn’t realize I was part of a “movement”. Since I just hit 60 a couple of weeks ago and haven’t been part of a movement with any relevance for nearly 40 years, that by itself is very meaningful!

    “All Things” illustrates the importance of consistent and credible communication in support of a movement. I’m just getting started here, and am working hard to connect with the e4s strategic narrative. Here’s a huge piece-I hadn’t come across the e4s definition of engagement before.

    And, I was unaware of the employee engagement global community via Google+. I feel like a kid at Christmas needing to quit his day job to have time to play. Instead it will be a 13+hr day that starts on the road in 7hrs so signing off.

    Thanks again-having a blast!

  5. Hi Craig, thank you for your comment. There’s a lot of good resources shared by e4s, particularly via the G+ community daily. Enjoy! Rachel

  6. […] A focus on: All things employee engagement […]

  7. […] of the early All Things IC articles Rachel wrote about employee engagement appeared back in 2014, highlighting the Engage for Success four drivers of employee engagement. […]

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