How to engage for success

The Engage for Success movement continues to go from strength to strength and there is a wealth of resources available at your fingertips. If you are looking for guidance to help you navigate through all things employee engagement related, you’re in luck as the opportunities and information are limitless. I’m going to guide you through just some of the offerings that are available to access to help you engage for success in your organisation.

What is employee engagement? The Engage for Success definition is: 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.

I wrote about the Engage for Success website when it launched back in November, and since then it has continued to be filled with research documents, events and information to inform and educate about employee engagement.

There are lots of resources available to download for free to equip you with the latest thinking and facts and figures to help you in your conversations. For example, there is a toolkit available via Headlines Comms that highlights information such as:

• Marks and Spencer stores with improving engagement had, on average, delivered £62 million more sales than stores with declining engagement.

• Sainsbury’s found that colleage engagement contributed up to 15 per cent of a store’s year-on-year growth.

• Dorothy Perkins stores with high levels of engagement produced 12 per cent higher growth in sales – the equivalent of £445,000 extra revenue.

Although there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach and no master model for successful employee engagement, there were four common themes that emerged from the extensive research captured in the Engaging For Success report to government.

Taken together, they include many of the key elements that go to make successful employee engagement. These four enablers of engagement have proved to be useful lenses which can help organisations assess the effectiveness of their approaches:

• Visible, empowering leadership providing a strong strategic narrative about the organisation, where it’s come from and where it’s going.

• Engaging managers who focus their people and give them scope, treat their people as individuals and coach and stretch their people.

• There is employee voice throughout the organisations, for reinforcing and challenging views, between functions and externally, employees are seen as central to the solution.

• There is organisational integrity – the values on the wall are reflected in day to day behaviours. There is no ‘say –do’ gap.

What does an engaged employee look like? The image on this page opens bigger and highlights some of the attributes. You’ll find it in the toolkit too.

The SlideShare deck of ‘Employee engagement: the evidence‘ has been viewed more than 14,000 times online! You can view it below. It is full of information and heavy on facts and figures. I get contacted regularly by comms professionals who are studying employee engagement and internal communication and are looking for information, I think you’ll find this deck useful.

Some of the information available via the Engage for Success website includes:

• What is employee engagement?
• The four enablers of engagement
• Hints and tips “I love my manager“
• Research into societal purpose
• Video: creating engaged employees
• Managing employee engagement in adversity
• Article: If engagement left as purely HR initiative, it will remain on sidelines
• Round-up of Engage for Success community and events
• Engagement in the news
• The role of engagement in employee wellbeing
• Slides and videos via SlideShare
• Using your employee survey as business tool for change
• Upcoming event: employee engagement summit, 14 April
• Article: Management still ‘biggest barrier’ to engagement

Your name here?
As you can see from the list above, there is lots of useful information on the website and on the web. However, it is a constantly evolving project and Engage for Success is looking for more case studies to share with people interested in and working on employee engagement. Do you have an idea? If you’ve spotted an article or have information that would form a good whitepaper (10,000 words) or case study (5,000 words) about the good work you’re doing, you can contact them via their contact form, or email content@engageforsuccess.org 

How to read and hear more
There are ongoing conversations about engagement that you’re welcome to get involved with. For example, every Monday at 4pm GMT, Engage for Success hosts a blogtalk radio show for an hour. You can listen back to the shows you may have missed and check out the schedule.

Last night former workmate of mine from Tube Lines, Katie Hadgraft, who is now Head of employee communication and engagement at Essex County Council, hosted Commschat on Twitter. The topic was employee engagement and you can read the transcript here if you missed it.

You can find Engage for Success on Twitter @engage4success, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn.

I’ll leave you with some slides and videos to enjoy. Thanks, as ever, for stopping by, Rachel

Slides: Employee engagement: the evidence