Employee engagment - crucial for recession survival
July 20, 2009
A government report has highlighted the vital role of employee engagement in helping UK businesses to survive the recession and prosper afterwards. The MacLeod Review, by David MacLeod, states that employee engagement could be more important than ‘almost anything else’ in improving business success through the difficult economic times. The review is based on research carried out with hundreds of employers, and found that whilst some organisations are displaying signs of good engagement activity, a lot of improvements could still be made. The report did not recommend legislative involvement in the action plan, but did recommend a national awareness campaign and a group of industry leaders to increase awareness and understanding of engagement.
Employee engagement will have a direct effect on business success at any time, but at the moment this is more critical than ever because businesses are having to work a lot harder and perform better than ever to maintain their position in the turbulent markets. This is also a time where employees are feeling insecure, less trusting of their company, or may even have ill feeling towards their employer following difficult restructures or redundancy programmes. Employees that are harbouring these feelings are less inclined or in some cases less capable to go the extra mile and perform at a high level for their employer, because their personal motivation and engagement levels have dropped so significantly.
Engagement can simply be described as making sure employees feel involved in and excited by their work. There are many different facets of employment that lead to job satisfaction and engagement, and individual engagement will be brought on by a combination of all of them. Some aspects that will affect this are:
- feeling fairly paid for what you do
- having a benefits package that suits your needs and lifestyle
- having a job that you enjoy and understand exactly where it fits into the organisational objectives
- being treated with respect by your colleagues and managers
- being given clear and constructive feedback
- having a manageable workload
- having a sense of shared values with the organisation
I could go on forever, which shows that one simple action from HR or the management team will not lead to fantastic engagement for the whole workforce. Keeping employees engaged can be hard work and it is often a very individual matter. This is why it is my opinion that line managers have a really big job in maintaining employee engagement within their teams. Staff surveys and consultation exercises can be a good way to measure overall engagement and give the organisation some ideas about projects that can be carried out, but it is on an individual level that engagement will be built successfully. A really good exercise for HR teams at the moment is therefore developing management capability to enable them to manage engagement themselves and see the benefit they can add by getting it right.
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