Expert opinion

What is employee engagement?
It is making people feel valued by an organisation, and making them want to ‘go the extra mile’ for it. Engaged employees are more creative and committed, give better customer service, take less sick leave, and are less likely to quit.

Why bother with engagement?
There is an ever-swelling body of evidence that the most innovative and successful organisations are those with the highest levels of employee engagement. Low engagement means a poor experience for your customers. Research studies have shown that less than a third of UK employees are fully engaged.

How do you measure engagement?
People’s lights are on and their desire to do a good job shines out. Look at your sickness and turnover rates and answers in staff surveys to questions such as: ‘I would recommend my organisation as a great place to work.’

How can we inspire engagement?
Staff need to understand where the organisation is going and what their part is in that. They need engaging managers who will coach and empower them to play their part and become the very best they can be. They need clear ways of making their views heard, and they need to see consistent behaviour and clear values from their management.

Common practices guaranteed to drive down engagement:

• Delegating ‘engagement’ to HR instead of leading it from the top.
• Skimping on recruitment so you fail to screen out non-engageable people.
• Recruiting managers for their technical rather than their people skills.
• Failing to train and support managers to manage well and consistently.
• Poor quality appraisal and supervision.
• Balking at running a staff survey when the scores may be bad ‘because we’re going through a difficult time’.
• Over-focusing on pay and material awards - these are not the primary drivers of engagement.
• Under-communicating with staff and assuming messages have been heard and understood correctly.
• Failing to close the feedback loop by letting staff know what has become of their ideas and concerns, if you’ve even listened to them in the first place.
• Forgetting to thank people for doing a good job.
• Letting under-performance and bad behaviour go unchallenged.
• Anything else that staff as a whole perceive as unfair: for example, better perks and less accountability for senior managers, or less generous pay and terms for staff on contracts.

Helen Giles is managing director of Broadway’s Real People HR consultancy. www.realconsultancy.com

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