Employee engagement may be the biggest factor in increasing your company's bottom line.

As a leader do you know how to activate higher employee engagement?

Engagement can be defined as the willingness of an employee to go the extra mile to help his or her company succeed.

A recent survey by Towers Watson of 90,000 workers in 18 countries found that companies with the highest level of employee engagement achieve better financial results and are more successful in retaining their most valued employees than companies with lower levels of engagement.

Those companies with the highest percentage of engaged workers increased operating income 19 percent and earnings per share 28 percent year to year, while those with the lowest showed declines of 33 percent in operating income and 11 percent in earnings per share.

The 2007-2008 study also found that less than 5 percent of engaged workers were actively looking for another job, while more than a quarter of disengaged employees were looking.

Many workers are disengaged

The good news is that employee engagement reaps great reward. The bad news is that less than a quarter of workers actually are engaged with their work and that more than a third of workers are partly to fully disengaged.

To calculate employees' level of engagement, the massive survey measured how emotionally connected employees were to their companies and jobs; what they thought about their work and the companies for whom they worked; and how they performed.

Think/feel/act methodology revealed

Engaged: Only 21 percent of workers are fully engaged in their work. These workers scored very high in all three measures of engagement.

Enrolled: 41 percent are partly engaged. Their scores were high in the think and act categories, but were significantly lower in their emotional connection with work.

The survey concludes that these enrolled workers tend to get their work done but they aren't connected emotionally to it and thus aren't going the “extra mile.”

Disenchanted: 30 percent of workers scored significantly lower on all three components of engagement, but dramatically lower on their emotional connection to their work.

Disengaged: 8 percent are completely disconnected from their work.

Closing the gap

Towers Perrin concludes that the numbers reflect an engagement gap between what companies need in order to meet their goals, what workers give and companies' effectiveness in channeling employee effort.

There is more good news, however. The survey also found that, contrary to the myth that engagement is an inherent trait, senior leadership has a significant impact on employee engagement.

The top driver of that engagement for workers was their belief that senior management had their best interests at heart. Unfortunately, only 10 percent of workers believed that was true. More than half of the respondents felt that managers treated them as if they didn't matter at all.

To close the engagement gap, managers might try:

1. Communicating the benefits of engagement. The survey revealed that employees are eager to invest more of themselves to help the company succeed, but they want to understand how their efforts will benefit them.

2. Showing that they care and value the employees. The survey concluded that companies need to understand their workers as well as they do their customers, and then design a work environment that reflects that understanding.

3. Emotionally connecting with, and inspiring, their workforce. Recognize the employees' untapped energy and ambition, and then channel it in ways that yield real results.

While the survey revealed that the above behaviors are quite rare among management around the world, adopting them could make a key difference to a company's bottom line.

Make it up, make it fun and make it happen!

ooo

Best-selling author Machen P. MacDonald is a certified life and business coach with ProBrilliance Leadership Institute in Grass Valley. Contact him at coach@probrilliance.com and (530) 273-8000.