The art (and science) of employee engagement

Stimulating work and little things like fruit bowls are the key to unlocking employee and business potential

How can organisations ensure that their employees are engaged?  To clarify, by this I mean motivated, committed and enthusiastic about their roles, rather than fretting about ebay sales, dinner plans or birthday gifts!  Given that industry sector, company size, culture and even individual personalities impact upon how people engage with their job and workplace, creating an environment to encourage this seems a rather mysterious art…

Thankfully, a UK organisation called Best Companies, which for the past 10 years has been examining employee engagement through its annual Best Companies to Work For survey and who have awarded Bite UK ‘extraordinary’ 3 Star Status in the 2010 Accreditation – have distilled this art into some relatively simple, even scientific, facts.    Ultimately this means that the foundations to encourage engagement are more solid than perhaps you’d expect.  As well as examining the traditional factors around management, leadership and teams, the survey looks at opportunities provided by workplaces for employee growth, wellbeing and the chance to ‘give something back’. 

Making sure that teams have interesting, stimulating work is a huge factor – just 39 percent of ‘disengaged’ employees would describe their roles in this way, compared to over 90 percent of engaged workers.  The importance of this is heightened by the fact that staff are more concerned with finding opportunities for growth and development in their work than financial gain – in the present challenging climate, finding a workplace where you can do (and improve on) something you enjoy each day is the key.

This means that organisations need to see the strengths within their teams – many employers simply aren’t in a position to expand at present so need to think more creatively about how to use the talents they already have.  This requires both supportive management, an awareness of people’s present skills, but also how they want to develop in future.  But aside from the larger issues such as career development, it’s also important to pick up on the smaller ideas which make a difference to day-to-day life at work – such as the introduction of a fruit bowl!

Without openness and transparent communication being encouraged, all of this becomes far more difficult to achieve.  In other words, if people can trust, talk to and feel inspired by those who manage and lead them, there are far fewer barriers to organisations as a whole finding ways to enable everyone to succeed.