How employee engagement can add £££ to your bottom line

Employee engagement is the emotional commitment that an employee has towards an organisation. Quite easily confused with employee satisfaction, Claire Morley-Jones (with help from Korn Ferry Hay Group’s Talent Q) looks at how employee engagement can truly be aligned to business goals and culture.

By Claire Morley-Jones

As an SME owner or manager looking to grow, you are at some point going to manage a team – and your role is to get the best out of them. That includes engaging them in using their talents for the good of the business, and in turn increasing productivity and profitability to build additional £££ to your bottom line – which we all love!

How do you get everyone working together effectively towards shared goals?

To start with, it helps if your team has the right capabilities, skills and experience. But in practice, often missing amongst team members is the will and desire to use those same capabilities, skills and experience to benefit your business.

According to our friends at Talent Q, just 21% of employees describe themselves as being fully engaged with a further 50% say they are moderately engaged. The good news is that 80% of the variation in employee engagement is down to manager – and that’s YOU.

You have it in your power to:

• Increase team performance: Engage your team members and enjoy the productivity benefits that will result from enhanced individual improvements.
• Improve customer care: Engaged team members achieve 10% higher customer care metrics. 70% of engaged employees have a good understanding of customer needs, compared to just 17% of disengaged employees.
• Boost morale in the team: Engaged employees are not only more driven to perform, they’re also more enthusiastic. Actively pursuing engagement can create a more conducive work environment for everyone.

4 Easy steps to employee engagement success!

Step 1 – Understand your team as individuals

Almost 50% of employees don’t feel they’re managed as ‘individuals’ and 81% claim that if they were treated as individuals, they would be more energised and engaged in their role.

If you can identify what exactly motivates each individual in your team, then you can ‘press the right buttons’ to ensure you keep them energised and engaged – recognising what motivates each individual can be a challenge. Talent Q’s ‘Drives’ is able to achieve just this.

Step 2 – Take action

Engaged employees are 10% more likely to exceed performance expectations and 87% less likely to leave than their disengaged colleagues. The management report produced by Drives gives you easy Do’s and Don’ts to follow which can help you facilitate a discussion with each member of your team on what would make them feel more engaged in their current role. When you know what motivates each individual, you can schedule work amongst the team accordingly, so that everyone has a chance to achieve what’s most important to them.

Create an action plan outlining what you and the individual intend to do, as a result of your discussion. Not only will this help to ensure the goals are achieved, it will also reassure the individual that their engagement is important to you.

Step 3 – Stay on top of it

Whilst the factors that motivate us may not change over time, the extent to which we actually feel engaged can vary considerably – even on different days – depending on changing circumstances. Often, it will be factors that are outside of an individual’s control that will impact on their engagement.

The only way to manage this is maintain open and regular communication with each individual in your team, so you can nip any engagement downturn in the bud, before it reduces productivity or even leads to a resignation.

Using the Drives management report, you can continually refer back to what motivates each individual and you can discuss with them whether their needs are being met and/or whether performance goals can be developed around the aspects of work they enjoy.

Step 4 – Facilitate more effective teamwork

Your team members are likely to be motivated by widely different factors – and this can impact on the performance and productivity of the team. The whole team will ultimately benefit if everyone does what they can to help each other feel enthusiastic and engaged.

The Drives management report gives you information about the likely impact of an individual’s motivations on others in the team. Being aware of these impacts – and the interactions that may occur in your team as a result – can help you to facilitate improved performance and mitigate against any risks that might reduce engagement.

Once you understand what motivates different members of your team, you not only get the best out of each individual, you can also improve overall productivity and enhance customer satisfaction.

Great for employee engagement and great for the profitability of your business.

At HR180 we have been trained in assessing Korn Ferry Hay Group Talent Q services – a wide range of business psychometrics. For a chat through your needs with no obligation please give our HR Superteam the opportunity to take you through your options and help you achieve your goals – contact details are below.