What is the emotional and intellectual involvement of employees in their work such as intensity focus and involvement known as?

Employee engagement is defined as the emotional investment employees make in their organizations. It is the passion, involvement, and motivation they bring to work, which they use to guide their work. Engaged employees identify with the goals of the organization and align their own goals with the organization’s goals.

The focus on employee engagement is on the rise globally. And it is not an issue relegated only to the HR team of an organization. It is a business concern that requires serious consideration. In this piece, we discuss what employee engagement means, why it is critical to the bottom line of an organization, effective technology-enabled employee engagement, and examples of employee engagement in action.

Table of Contents

• What Is Employee Engagement?
• What Are the Drivers of Employee Engagement?
• How Is Employee Engagement Measured?
• Examples of Employee Engagement in Action
• What Is the Future of Employee Engagement?

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is defined as employees’ emotional investment in their work – in terms of the passion they put into their work and the motivation they feel to do their job well.

Simon Sinek, the author of “Start With Why,” describes employee engagement in the simplest of terms: “When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.”

Fig 1. Employee traits based on the three types of engagement in an organization

The concept of employee engagement was first introduced in 1990 by Dr. William Kahn. He suggested that people are involved in their work at three levels – physically, cognitively, and emotionally. However, employees may be engaged at fewer levels, or even disengaged or actively disengaged.

We spoke to Jim McCoy, chief revenue officer and general manager at Scout Exchange, an AI-powered recruitment marketplace, who shared some of the character traits engaged employees exhibit. He says, “Highly engaged employees are typically high energy people that have close relationships with their colleagues, including their direct manager or supervisor. They have a clear sense of commitment to their organization. They are excited to take on new challenges, embrace change, and welcome solving tough problems. They also tend to be curious by nature, continually learning, and regularly seeking new ways to broaden their existing skill sets. They effectively are ambassadors for the organization, continually looking for ways to promote the organization and further the organizational mission.”

As opposed to engaged employees, disengaged employees simply put in their specified hours at work and leave. They do not involve themselves in activities beyond their regular jobs, and they value the job just enough to ensure that they get their paycheck at the end of the month.

A level above disengaged employees are actively disengaged employees. Such employees are not only unproductive, but they also undermine the work engaged employees do. Their negative attitude may create a toxic workplace, and they essentially become a burden on the business.

Why is employee engagement important for business?

A Gallup study states that “the behaviors of highly engaged business units result in 21% greater profitability.” Also, employees appreciate a work culture that enables engagement. This means organizations that prioritize engagement are more likely to attract and retain talent.

Who is responsible for employee engagement?

The onus of planning engagement activities and executing them is not on HR alone anymore. HR plays an active role in implementing employee engagement strategies, but the planning and execution require involvement from leaders and managers in the organization as well. The success of an employee engagement program depends on employees’ receptivity to it. Employee engagement, then, is an organization-wide collaborative function.

At what point does employee engagement begin?

Engagement begins at the beginning of the employee lifecycle, from the candidate experience, the recruitment process, continuing through onboarding, career planning, learning and development, leadership and succession, and retirement or exit from the organization.

However, employee engagement is a two-way street. Even if organizations follow the best practices in employee engagement, there is a specific personality that employees must either possess or inculcate in themselves to be an excellent cultural fit for the organization. Individuals who display optimism, hard work, and positivity are more likely to be engaged in their work than those who don’t.

Learn More: 20 Fresh Employee Engagement Ideas for 2020

What Are the Drivers of Employee Engagement?

Engagement initiatives in the following areas, spanning the entire employee lifecycle, can prevent the attrition of high-value and high-potential employees. Earlier, presentations and other handouts did the trick in communicating with employees and trying to engage them. This has now changed, with employees needing much more than just one-way communication to be engaged. Here are the eight drivers of employee engagement.

Fig 2. The 8 factors that drive employee engagement

1. Seamless onboarding

Employee engagement truly begins when the employee is recruited and begins the onboarding process. However, even before being hired, a candidate gets a glimpse of the organization’s communication culture.

Once hired, the onboarding process gives employees an idea of whether they want to continue in the organization for the long term. One way to ensure employee engagement during onboarding is to give employees enough time to master their job before they hit the floor.

This means that when they do, they will be ready to take on the job with confidence and build a lasting career in the organization.

2. Positive work culture

Work culture is a broad term, but specific factors contribute to keeping employees engaged.

Transparency: Engaged employees care about the organization. Employees tend to care when organizations:

• Share company goals and values with employees.
• Tell employees exactly what is expected of them and how to achieve it.
• Give them regular updates about the progress of the company and where it stands in the global marketplace.
• Communicate how employees’ effort benefits the organization and contributes to the bigger picture.

All these steps create a sense of belonging and naturally encourage employees to do more to drive better results.

Openness: An open work culture is essential to make employees feel respected and cared for. In an open work culture, employees should be able to:

• Receive important communication regularly through a unified channel from the organization, their managers, and colleagues.
• Freely communicate with their managers about any task/issue.
• Provide anonymous feedback about issues they are having with their managers.
• Report workplace misconduct anonymously.

Autonomy: Micro-management is rarely well-received by employees. They need a certain degree of independence to be productive. An organization can ensure employees have this autonomy by answering these questions:

• Do employees have the freedom to decide how they go about their daily tasks?
• Do they have the freedom to plan their career path in the organization?
• Are they included in making critical decisions that may affect them directly?

Respectful Treatment: Employees rate respectful treatment and empathy as high as compensation when it comes to job satisfaction and engagement. When treated with the same level of respect as a company’s most loyal customers, employees will be more invested in achieving business outcomes.

3. Access to productivity and time management tools

A slew of unplanned activities, meetings, and workplace distractions can reduce the overall productive time in a day for an employee. Time management is an inherent skill, but in a dynamic work environment, even the most efficient employees need time management tools. Supporting time management can directly result in improved productivity.

Tools that enable employee engagement include time management and collaboration tools such as Slack, Wunderlist, and Trello to break down and time deadline-oriented tasks. Even with frequent interruptions, to some extent, these tools can improve employee output.

4. Learning and development opportunities

Organizations that provide structured learning and development opportunities to their employees notice higher levels of engagement. This visible interest in employee growth elicits a feeling of reciprocation from employees – they are more likely to be interested in the organization’s growth.

In a generation that is on the go, this learning is mainly delivered through learning experience platforms via m-learning (mobile learning) and microlearning. Additionally, gamifying the learning process can get even less engaged employees to participate and open up greater opportunities for themselves.

5. Effective leadership and succession planning

Employees are more likely to demonstrate the traits of engagement when they are made aware of the growth opportunities that lie in store for them. Closely tied to learning and development, leadership and succession planning is a key driver of engagement, especially among the millennial and younger workforce. In this area, HR teams and leaders of the organizations work together to identify key positions to be filled and the available talent to fill these positions.

Applying technology to an organization’s succession planning strategy can make it a more streamlined process. Machine learning-powered analytics solutions such as Ascendify can help identify potential talent, link them with the skills and qualifications required for a specific leadership position, and enable HR to tailor learning and development plans for that talent. This level of personalization can significantly improve engagement levels.

6. Workplace wellness initiatives

Stress is a more common problem in the workplace than is visible. Combined with the physical inactivity of most office jobs, a cocktail of health issues emerges that can easily be attributed to the workplace. Workplace wellness initiatives can go a long way in showing employees that employers care.

Organizations are now investing in wearable technologies to help employees stay fit. These include fitness bands and smart footwear. Some of these wearables are even equipped to monitor blood pressure and general health. Given the sensitive nature of this data, HR teams need to adhere to strict compliance rules when receiving and using this data. Also, employees need to be able to opt out of workplace wellness programs if they are uncomfortable sharing their health data with their employers.

7. Flexibility

In a study conducted in 2014, 13% of those surveyed said they had quit a job due to lack of flexibility. In 2018, this number was 31%. The arrival of the gig economy and the increasing demand for workplace flexibility has made it one of the most critical drivers of employee engagement. Any organization that allows employees to enjoy a certain amount of flexibility in where they work is more likely to experience higher levels of engagement. There are two reasons for this:

• Organizations show that they trust employees to do their job no matter where they are.
• Employees tend to perform better without the stress of commuting and when they are in their own comfortable space.

Collaboration tools like Slack and Skype enable seamless conversations not only within organizations but also across remote teams. With the advent of unified HCM platforms, all the benefits that are offered to in-house employees can be provided to mobile workers as well.

8. Rewards and recognition

Employees appreciate meaningful recognition for their work. Regular feedback and checking in on employees are positive drivers of engagement. This feedback should be designed to communicate how the employees’ efforts are helping the organization.

Through employee recognition platforms, leaders can shout out to a specific employee or group of employees to recognize their achievements. These platforms allow for instant recognition among peers and senior leaders – delivering said recognition and rewards when they are due, not months later, during the performance appraisal. These platforms even allow employees to choose their own rewards, when eligible.

Companies are also resorting to social media to boost engagement by publicly recognizing their employees. This can be a great way to engage them in becoming brand ambassadors for the organization by demonstrating their own recognition and achievements to the world.

Learn More: Employee Engagement vs. Job Satisfaction: Key Differences and Metrics

How Is Employee Engagement Measured?

Fig 3. 5 useful tools to measure employee engagement

Employee engagement is measured in two parts. First, the data is collected through various channels. Then, this data is analyzed against key metrics that quantify the engagement levels of the whole organization.

The following tools and methodologies can be used to measure employee engagement:

1. Pulse surveys

While surveys are the most common way of measuring employee engagement, they should be supplemented with measurable data that can be verified independently. Consider a survey question that asks, “Do you think that having X number of meetings in a day hampers your productivity?” This survey should be supplemented with data on how many meetings occur per day, the amount of time employees spend unfocused before and after the meeting, and what their productive output for the day is. This data, along with the survey responses, can then be used to identify what the actual effect of having a certain number of meetings every day is.

Experts now recommend ditching annual surveys and administering pulse surveys instead. Pulse surveys offer insights frequently into the state of engagement in an organization. This means there will be fewer instances of overhauling employee engagement strategy and more cases of merely tweaking it.

However, frequent surveys can cause feedback fatigue if employees have to take time out often to answer them. To prevent this fatigue, pulse surveys can now be administered through AI-powered chatbots. As they can be answered instantly and even on the go, these surveys are more likely to yield honest responses from employees.

Learn More: 20 Essential Employee Engagement Survey Questions for Your 2020 Questionnaire

2. Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis, a method of extracting information from subjective data, can help identify the general sentiment found in the language employees use in their online conversations. By combing through email and chat data, sentiment analysis tools enable the identification of toxic workplace behaviors in a single team, for example, or across teams. All the data collected is kept anonymous. Sentiment analysis can provide real insights into whether employees honestly answer surveys.

3. Employee net promoter score (eNPS)

Employee net promoter score is a metric used to measure employee loyalty by asking how willing employees are to promote the organization as a place to work. For eNPS to be a valid measure of employee engagement, it must:

• Be administered at regular intervals – monthly or quarterly.
• Collect anonymous responses.
• Be combined with data received from surveys and other sources.

4. One-on-one meetings (monthly)

No technology can replace the human touch of one-on-one meetings. Employees feel heard when they are given the opportunity to have a real conversation to express their thoughts. Anonymous feedback can help voice the broader issues. For more specific, personal issues, one-on-one meetings are an excellent way for managers to identify the general mood of employees.

5. Stay/Exit interviews

Sometimes it is difficult to get employees to stay in a company. But conducting an exit interview can give HR teams a valuable trove of information, which they can use to enhance the engagement levels of existing employees. These interviews often reveal how important it is to continuously engage with employees to prevent such instances, starting from the onboarding process and setting the tone in that crucial 90-day period to define a culture that even new employees can feel engaged in.

Once data is obtained from these methods, employee engagement analytics can come to your aid to offer actionable insights. Analytics platforms empowered with predictive technologies can provide insights that can help develop robust employee engagement strategies or simply modify existing strategies to meet engagement goals, improve engagement, and even sustain engagement.

Examples of Employee Engagement in Action

Focusing on employee engagement is no longer an option. It is a requirement. Companies that still don’t prioritize it will most likely lose top talent who will find greener pastures where they are available. No matter the scale of your organization, there is something to learn from the employee engagement strategies of any organization. Here are a few real-life examples of employee engagement for your inspiration.

1. CB Insights and its effort toward continuing education

A young company with 300 employees, CB Insights offers a host of benefits to its employees. But some of them worth noting are the stipend of $1,000 they provide employees to pursue continuing education. They also have diversity initiatives that include unconscious bias training as well as a gender pay gap below 10%. Employers who focus on the career development of their employees are more likely to have an engaged workforce.

2. L’Oréal and its effort to welcome new employees in style

In a unique initiative, in 2017, L’Oréal built an employee onboarding app that is only devoted to helping new recruits understand and embrace their company culture. By introducing gamification and delivering key information in small, retainable chunks, L’Oréal has made it clear that engagement begins at the start of the employee lifecycle.

3. Hireology and its effort toward inclusivity of its remotest employees

Hireology ensures first that it allows for remote work where necessary, and that it equips colleagues sitting miles away to communicate with these remote employees easily. They facilitate this with high-end videoconferencing gear in each room. Their effort toward including their remote employees also includes flying them into their offices for face time with the rest of the team twice a year! Getting remote workers to feel engaged is a challenge, but Hireology has ensured that they overcome this challenge with care.

Learn More: How to Engage Employees in 2020: 10 Impactful Solutions

What Is the Future of Employee Engagement?

We live in an exciting time. In an earlier generation, people might have been reprimanded for not being motivated to work and not giving their 100% (and a little more to their jobs). Now, the best practices for employee engagement have evolved, and organizations have realized that employee engagement is something they can encourage and control.

As Jim says, “Moving forward, employee engagement will continue to become more fluid. Instead of one-time annual surveys, we’ll see organizations adopting more ongoing and holistic strategies that allow for two-way conversations and real-time feedback. Additionally, we’ll see more and more companies recognize the importance of providing high-quality continuous learning and career development opportunities for their employees.”

Employee engagement is a challenging metric for organizations. In fact, companies are beginning to move beyond employee engagement to focus on workforce experience. Following a technology-enabled, data-driven approach to implement and measure employee engagement can elevate the level of happiness, satisfaction, and involvement employees experience on the job. And as the famous saying goes, happy employees make happy customers.

What employee engagement strategies is your organization implementing? Which technologies are you using to improve engagement? We would love to hear from you on our Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn pages!

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