Amongst disengaged employees there are three main factors that indicate how they are affected personally and in the workplace.
Employee engagement is a hot topic and putting the right employee engagement strategy in place is a priority for many organizations. Unfortunately, only 34% of US workers are engaged at work according to the most recent Gallup poll.
Employee engagement can be defined as the level of commitment, passion, and loyalty a worker has toward their work and company and amongst disengaged employees there are three main factors that indicate how they are affected personally and in the workplace:
• Managing difficult relationships/politics in the workplace
• Being overstretched with high volume/pace of work
• Feelings of being criticized or personally attacked
Companies that do a great job at engaging their employees actually achieve earnings-per-share growth that is more than four times that of their competitors and in addition, the Society for Human Resource Management indicates that high levels of employee engagement:• promotes retention of talent,
• fosters customer loyalty and
• improves organizational performance.
One self-managed method to drive engagement is the use of intrinsic methods of rewarding employees. Kenneth Thomas, author and expert on intrinsic motivation, noted that employees feel engaged and motivated when they can add value through innovating, problem solving and improvising to meet customers’ needs. This requires employees to make a judgment—about the meaningfulness of their purpose, the degree of choice they have for doing things the right way, the competence of their performance, and the actual progress being made toward fulfilling the purpose.”
By encouraging participation in the decision-making process it also becomes self-sustaining and empowers individuals to feel that they are making a worthy contribution. This creates a performance-driven cycle of positive reinforcement where the results are trust, engagement, and significantly higher job satisfaction.
