The Strategic Employer

What if I told you that your company could double its profit margin through employee engagement?  Would that make employee engagement a priority?  What if your profit margin only improved by 20%?  Still a priority?  If employee engagement is not a priority today, then it should be.  Your corporate talent has more to do with driving profitability and competitive edge than anything else in your company.   Engaged employees are more productive, more enthusiastic, and more effective than just competent employees.

Employee engagement is not the same as employee motivation.   If you have a workforce of engaged employees then employee motivation takes care of itself.  You don’t need expensive rewards and programs to foster engaged employees.  For little or no expense you can create an employee engagement culture that will improve employee morale and employee relations.  What it will take is some planning.

Company leaders can invest 30 days and follow four simple steps to plan for effective employee engagement.    There are few principals to keep in mind, however, before you start employee engagement planning.  First, don’t confuse employee engagement with employee involvement.  Only when employee involvement is focused on the company mission and passion will you get engaged employees.  Second, employee engagement is not employee relations.  Employee relations are a barometer of employee engagement.

To plan for employee engagement on a super tight budget, follow these four steps over the next 30 days.

1. Survey Employees – Find out why they come to work.  What is it they want to contribute to the customers they serve?  Why is this meaningful to them?  You have to understand this to know how to help your team become engaged employees.
2. Brainstorm – Hold a meeting with company leaders and key contributors.  Present the results of your survey.   Look at gaps between what employees want and what they are getting.  Remember you are looking for gaps in the meaningfulness of the work, not the benefits you provide.  Next, have the group brainstorm low/no cost ways to bridge these gaps.
3. Prioritize – Review the brainstorm ideas and prioritize the ideas that will have the most impact on employee engagement.  Develop metrics to gauge the impact of these ideas.
4. Implement and Test – Implement the number one priority over the next 30 days.  Measure the impact against the metrics you developed.  If you don’t get the results you expected, fine tune and try again.  Then move to the next priority.

Of course it would be more effective to get outside help to facilitate this process if your budget permits.  By following these four steps, however, you will start to raise the level of employee engagement and your profit margin.

Richard Yadon consults and speaks about employee engagement and other talent management issues. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under employee retention, hiring process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.