Psychology of Employee Engagement (Or how I learned to stop worrying and love my team!) Part II

In previous part we emphasized on importance of Human Resources and Employee Engagement and its key role in organization’s higher profits, productivity and employee retention.

In addition, we defined employee ENGAGEMENT.

NOW, the question is “How can we measure, create, maintain and increase employee engagement rates in our organizations?”

To measure employee engagement, there are couple of standard tests. For instance:

1-    Gallup Quarterly Employee Engagement Survey

2-    SurveyMonkey.com Employee Engagement Survey

You can use any of these tests or you may employ scientists to design customized questionnaires for your organization. Surveys mentioned above work well for most of the companies.

Good! Ok, we are able measured it, let’s see how we can create and improve engagement.

First, we’ll take a look at practices employed by most successful companies with highest engagement rates: (There are tons of articles describing details of these technics, here we will point out key items and the most important quotes)

• Googles People operation (HR): Training normal people for engagement works more effectively than recruiting high achievers
• Gallup: Employees are 3 times more engaged in organizations where managers focus more on their strengths and positive characteristics
• Research shows that involvement in decision making and letting employees voice their opinions improve employee engagement
• Engagement rises when employees have an opportunity to improve their careers
• Google: “It’s all about removing barriers so Googlers can focus on the things they love, both inside and outside of work. We’re constantly searching for unique ways to improve the health and happiness of our Googlers.”
• Gallup: Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores. Company’s culture starts at the top, so encourage senior leaders to be more open and honest with employees—and to encourage their reports to do the same
• Jim Goodnight—SAS Institute’s founder and CEO—says: “If you treat people as if they make a difference, they will make a difference.”
• To have people who are excited to do their best at work, companies should make sure they have clear objectives, they feel their talents and expertise match their responsibilities and their achievements are well recognized by seniors.
• According to Prasad Setty, VP of People Operations at Google, one of the company’s core tenants is “if you give people freedom, they will amaze you.”
• For employees, feeling of having control and freedom is a huge engagement booster. Googlers have flexible work schedule, on premise leisure, entertainment, and facilities. They are inspired by having the freedom to dedicate 20% of working hours to other projects which they are passionate about.
• Highest-performing teams feel safe speaking up and sharing their ideas. The best way to make employees feel that they matter to the company is to respond and react to their suggestions.

 

To make this information useful, let me summarize key elements of engagement for you:

1-    Career & Professional development opportunities

2-    Training and Development for Engagement

3-    Focus on employees’ and leaders’ strengths and positive characteristics

4-    Embracing, Encouraging and empowering strength-based team dynamics

5-    Culture of HAPPINESS and HOPE at workplace

6-    Positive Relationship: The culture of “Trust, Respect, openness, honesty and Empathy”

7-    Positive Communication: Fostering the opportunity for employees to share their opinion and take part in decisions.

8-    Helping people reach their goals and understand the fact that their achievements contribute to the overall success of their organization

9-    Resilience: Perseverance in pursuit of their goals, adaptability in difficult situations and flexibility to change

10-  Helping employees understand their positive impact on society

11-  Technics and plans to provide work-life balance

12-  Training courses to improve emotional intelligence and soft skills for effective communication

13-  Fostering the sense of freedom and control at work

14-  Empowering team-working and leadership capabilities

15-  Fair compensation & benefits, job security and safe & pleasant work environment

 

As you can see, except the last item, most of these elements are psychological and social factors. (Ah-huh that’s why Google employs psychologists and social scientists in People’s department (You read HR))

 

In part III of this article we will discuss psychological bases of employee engagement.

Thank you for reading this article!

Please share your ideas!