Time to make engagement meaningful and engaging to everyone....

Like so many things in the world today it feels like Employee Engagement has become a tick box exercise that creates reams and reams of data and drives companies and individuals into analysis paralysis, does it really have the desired impact helping individuals to become more engaged or support business growth?

If you ask employees what ‘Employee Engagement’ is in the organisation they work in, your most likely response will be an annual, or bi-annual, survey. Then if you ask them how this impacts their working life or engagement they will often say it doesn’t, but why is this? The simple answer is that the survey is meaningless to them as an individual, it is just a serious of numbers or percentages that doesn’t give them anything tangible. Not only this but, the same areas to develop often come up year after year with no significant change to the individual.

The survey can be useful to help executives understand how to improve the organisation, at a high level, but why is the impact of the survey not being felt down through the organisation and how can this be changed to get real impact and drive up engagement across organisations?

The simple answer is to create a story behind it, build something that helps employees understand it and make it meaningful to the individual. Let me share Engage to Succeeds approach:

1) Create Story

What was you best day ever at work? We, as an organisation, want to support you to have as many great days as you can in a week, month and year whilst you work here. We will support you to spend as much time 'Flying High' as we can.

2) Develop understanding

Engagement is about helping individuals understand themselves, what motivates & drives them, what they are passionate about and finally how to increase their performance. By supporting them with this it helps them to ‘Love their job... MORE... everyday’.

3) Make it meaningful

Utilise the Engage to Succeed model, share the 4 levels of engagement and ask ‘Where are you today?”, followed by “what needs to change to improve your engagement?”. This can be used by both the individual or the manager to support in driving the levels up or supporting people that may be slightly DISengaged.

Engage to Succeed has defined 4 levels of engagement that are determined by the level of Passion (both personal and work) that an individual is achieving and the level of Performance too. These levels are:

1. Stuck in a rut (Low Passion & Low Performance
2. On the Up (High Passion & Low Performance
3. Rollercoaster Ride (Low Passion & High Performance)
4. Flying High (High Passion & High Performance)

Someone could move through two, or even three levels, in a day which makes it even more important to make engagement meaningful to the individual. They are primarily the person who owns engagement, not anyone else, so stop trying to engage people with survey results and start helping people to engage themselves. The manger needs to support them and the organisation needs to provide the tools to help them but they have to own it and drive it.

Over the coming weeks there will be more insight into each of these levels, so if you are an individual, a manager or even a business you will start to get an insight into where you may be, and how you could use this, to drive meaningful engagement.

For more rapid insights then message me at [email protected] or via LinkedIn