What is the number one driver of employee engagement?

Having partnered with over 100 organisations to measure and improve employee engagement over the past seven years, I often have clients ask me: What is the ‘secret sauce’ to engaging staff?

The answer unfortunately does not lie within a neat, prescriptive, step-wise process. Rather, to truly engage staff requires an intimate understanding of their specific individual motivations, communications preferences, desire for flexibility, level of culture fit and systemic frustrations.

However, there is one overarching principle that can make a big difference between an engaged, positive work environment and its disengaged counterpart - showing employees that you genuinely care about them.

When employees believe that their organization is concerned about them and cares about their well-being, they are likely to respond by attempting to fulfil their obligations to the organization and becoming more engaged.

This number one driver of employee engagement relates to the reciprocity rules within social exchange theory (see Khan, 2006). The more that an organisation shows support for staff, the more employees feel obliged (at a conscious or sub-conscious level) to respond in kind to the organisation by bringing a great attitude to work, working harder and displaying discretionary effort. In other words, employees desire initiatives and behaviours that care about their wellbeing, take an interest in them as people and care about how they feel.

A study by Mathumby and Dodd (2013) showed that perceived organisational support is highly significant and positively correlated with work engagement. Similarly, Sridevi and Srinivasan (2012) found that perceived organisational care accounted for almost of a third of an individual’s likelihood to engage with the organisation.

This is why organisations can immediately improve engagement levels just by going about the process of conducting an employee survey or staff ‘check-ins’. The challenge then lies in building from this momentum by genuinely listening to, and acting on, employee concerns and suggested improvements.

Factors that make employees feel cared about

You will note that I have not provided a neat definition to what a caring organisation is and how to display this care to your workforce. This is because I have seen organisations eagerly research best practice techniques for increasing perceived organisational support and then implement these with varying degrees of success.

Meta-analyses on factors that make employees feel cared about (see for instance, Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002) highlight the importance of an authentic, inclusive and proactive process for promoting a sense of care. A pay increase as a consequence of union activity will have a different impact on perceived organisational support than a voluntary pay increase in recognition of outstanding work. The findings of this study reveal three main factors that increase perceived organisational support and make employees feel valued and cared about. These are:

1. Fairness (how equally resources are perceived to be allocated across the organisation and within teams)
2. Support from supervisors (how valued the employee feels from their supervisor). Dale Carnegie suggests that there is a high correlation between the perception of care provided by supervisors and perceived organisational care)
3. Rewards and job conditions (how the employee rates rewards and job conditions). Perceived support is decreased by stressful job conditions such as having unclear or contradictory responsibilities or being overloaded with work.

However, what makes an individual feel cared about, and the resources and benefits they regard might be very different to the person sitting next to them. For instance, flexible working arrangements might be incredibly important for working Mums and Dads, but discussions surrounding long-term career goals might be far more important for the younger working generation. I am certainly not advising to only offer one or the other, the point is employee engagement and a sense of care from the organisation cannot be achieved from a one-size-fits-all approach.

This provides an exciting opportunity for managers to ask their employees what care means to them on an individual basis.

A final word

Remember, it is quite simple to create engagement for the job, but it is another thing to create engagement for the organisation to the extent that the employee will be your advocate! Managers must also understand that what makes individual employees feel cared about will change (often quite quickly!).

As a consequence, organisations that set and then forget their engagement strategy can undo all of the great work and resources required to develop their engagement plans. Discussions on perceived organisational care is a long-term and on-going process that requires continued interactions over time.

?What are your thoughts? I look forward to seeing your thoughts on what you believe care means to your workforce and how you have sought to identify individual factors to promote care below!