The Single Key To Improving Employee Engagement

The Single Key To Improving Employee Engagement

by Dr. Joe Folkman

A large organization had a high level of employee engagement in 2009. They believed a workforce of highly engaged and committed employees was a key factor influencing business success and a positive culture. Everyone seemed pleased with the high level of engagement until one senior leader said, “If high engagement is good, wouldn’t an even higher level be better?”

The CEO believed that if the company set a goal to maintain the high level of engagement, it would decline — the only way to keep engagement high is to work hard to take it continually higher. Over the years this organization has measured the engagement of its employees and has found a way to continuously improve the level of engagement in the organization. The graph below shows engagement in this organization over the last several years.

It’s difficult for an organization to reach a high level of employee engagement, but it’s even more difficult to continuously improve on this score. In fact, with a changing workforce, new demographics and external competition many organizations have experienced a decrease in engagement over the last few years. As you can see from the above graph, however, employee commitment at this organization has managed to buck the trend and has increased every year.

Levels Of Engagement

To put the success of this organization into context, we matched items in their employee surveys to items in our global norms. We divided the employees into four groups based on their responses to the employee engagement items, as follows:

• High Engagement (Most positive response to each item)

• Moderate Engagement (Positive response to each item)

• Low Engagement (Mixed positive and negative/neutral responses)

• Uncommitted/Unsatisfied (Negative/neutral responses to all items)

Read more here.

Source: Forbes