By Chris Witt, Vice President and General Manager, Portfolio Solutions at Tektronix. Chris lives in Portland, Oregon.
More than half a century of research has established a strong connection between employee engagement and corporate prosperity. The benefits of increasing your employee engagement include greater productivity, improved performance, lower turnover, better recruiting success and even higher earnings per share (EPS).
My experience confirms many of these benefits. Spend enough time at any company and you can feel it. When I first joined my company nine years ago, I could sense something was amiss. Team cohesiveness was strong, but trust and engagement were low.
It took time for me to restore trust, a sense of purpose and enthusiasm in my team. Through deliberate action, I believe that anyone can improve employee engagement and help transform a work environment into a thriving enterprise where the team is energized and engaged.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is a measure of how committed employees are to the company, including how invested they are in its goals and its principles.
Gallup has been measuring U.S. employee engagement for decades. The percentage of engaged employees increased to 36% in 2020, but it has been dropping since. Gallup report in 2022 states that “32% of full- and part-time employees working for organizations are now engaged, while 17% are actively disengaged, an increase of one percentage point from last year.”
I see two lessons in those numbers. First, not only does it take an active effort to achieve employee engagement, but it also takes work to sustain it. Second, employee engagement starts with the corporate goals and principles that they are asked to commit to.
Goals
To help with engagement, leaders must set goals, and it is imperative that they communicate what those goals are to the rest of the company. This is not anywhere near as simple as it might sound.
Leaders must devise business goals that they have a legitimate expectation of achieving because the next step isn’t merely communicating internally what those plans are; it is justifying those plans.
Bluntly, it is nearly possible to inspire employees to commit to goals that you cannot explain and have no reasonable plan for achieving. That explanation must include how employees’ work is related to business goals. Implicit in all of this is how employee engagement must be a leadership priority. Corporate goals and corporate principles originate with leadership.
Principles
Employee engagement is likely to suffer if corporate goals aren’t complemented by corporate principles. Call it what you will—company values, corporate culture, management style—but holding yourself to principles is critical in transforming a work environment.
I find that employees are more engaged if their contributions to the company are recognized and valued. It helps if these values are stated explicitly. But if it’s not explicit, the concepts should then be inherent in your company’s stated principles. Furthermore, I believe a company should adopt routine mechanisms for providing recognition to employees.
All the research says it is as important to get buy-in to corporate principles as it is to get commitment to company goals. Employees’ commitment to a company depends on the sum of their experiences at the company. People react to how they are treated not only by management but by their peers.
Communications And Commitment
The low engagement scores when I arrived at my company were a clear call to action as well as an opportunity. While our business had been through a tough cycle, I could see that the prospects were excellent.
We had lots of conversations with our workforce about how to move forward. To put a fine point on it, we deliberately asked our employees to help define the problems we wanted to solve. Doing this can help foster employee engagement. We worked to bring the conversation from the past to the present and the future, helping center the discussion around tangible actions and improvement priorities.
You can use employee input to define team goals and priorities. Tightening your focus can allow you to identify specific areas where you can dedicate resources and innovate. Ask yourself how you can do a better job serving your customers and remove friction complexity from your internal processes.
In my case, as we began to explain and justify the plan, employees started to buy in. As employee engagement increased, we began to reap all the benefits that the research promised: improved performance at the individual, team and company levels—including better financial results.
Digging Into The Data
Surveys are great tools, but every tool has its limitations. A company’s ability to perform at better-than-market levels comes down to how well its teams are aligned. You just can’t get that out of surveys. The lens you should apply is, “What are we trying to do together, and what is the survey telling me?”
As employee engagement at my company improved, we noticed groups whose scores lagged compared to the rest of the company. To see what was going on, we went right to the point of impact. Authentically listening to employees helped us understand how to improve. For some teams, the individuals felt disconnected from the company’s direction and strategy. Closer to the front line, more work was needed to articulate “the why” and discuss the challenges of change, like friction and frustration.
We worked more on our communication and spent more time discussing tangible, actionable improvements to improve our messaging.
The Process
To continue seeing benefits, make sure to continue surveying employee engagement from time to time. The same Gallup results I cited earlier demonstrate that it is possible to lose employee engagement if it isn’t a priority—even when things are positive. A steady focus is essential to keep engagement going.
The research is unequivocal. Employees with a sense of purpose and a high level of job satisfaction perform better than those who aren’t engaged. It’s a force multiplier to have a happy and engaged team. It’s worth the effort.
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