Employee engagement: putting employees first

Disclaimer – The opinions expressed in this article are solely my own and not those of my employer or anyone else; nor are they intended as professional HR advice the one readers should trust.

Attracting and retaining highly talented people will be one of the most challenging HR activities in the coming years, considering the increasingly dynamic job market. With the demands of companies today, it is important to create a highly competitive and productive work environment and therefore build dynamic teams. If companies want to build a highly competitive and productive workforce, they need equally motivated and committed employees.

An article in the Wall Street Journal defined the American workplace as MEH! In other words, people are not enthusiastic about their work. The following statistics from the 2013 Gallop survey were provided to support this claim:

• 52% of all full-time workers in America are not involved, enthusiastic, or committed to their work.

• 18% are “actively disconnected,” meaning they have gone beyond simple mental checking and may even be undermining the accomplishments of their colleagues.

• 30% of American workers are excited about their work.

Employee engagement it is the extent to which an individual engages and is satisfied in their work. Engaged teams feel positive and excited about the work they do. They participate in discussions and meetings and have a voice in the organization.

The Chartered Institute of Professional Development (CIPD) divides the engagement into three main facets:

• Intellectual commitment: think hard about work and how to do it better
• Affective commitment: feel positive about doing a good job
• Social commitment: Actively take advantage of opportunities to discuss work-related improvements with others at work.

What difference does it make to organizations to cultivate and nurture committed teams? These are just a few of the factors affected by a compromised or disengaged team, profit or loss, customer satisfaction or complaints, poor productivity or performance, staff turnover or retention, absenteeism, quality or defects. According to the Wall Street Journal article, Gallup estimates that actively disgruntled workers cost between $ 450 billion and $ 550 billion a year, due to high absenteeism and turnover, quality control problems and lost productivity.

Empowered employees

Employees have a wealth of operational knowledge to contribute to any project, change program, initiative or goal and should not be underestimated or overlooked in any process. They have a great deal of value to add and by involving employees in the first discussions they will contribute significantly to the successful outcome.

The challenge for managers when managing teams is not to forget that they also manage people. These people may prefer to be treated differently. Some employees like to work autonomously and prefer to be managed remotely, others require a bit more guidance, and still others need to be held by the hand until they are safe or fully productive. Knowing the team, its strengths, developments, training needs, job preferences, and management styles is an important part of ensuring a fully motivated, engaged, and productive team.

In the attached video, Steve Wynn, owner of Wynn Resorts, provides an example of how employee engagement fueled customer service and changed his business. This is an example of both affective and social commitment.

Research conducted by CIPD identified key drivers that managers can activate to increase participation levels in their teams. The study indicated the importance of providing meaningful work, leadership no longer effective voice for employees. Employees want to participate in discussions, decisions, and be consulted on important issues that impact them. The data suggested that employee engagement and management communication had a positive association with both scope and frequency of engagement.

Employee engagement leads to business results

In 2010, despite staffing efforts, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) faced losses due to the number of employees who were eligible to retire. HUD was looking for powerful and multifaceted hiring strategies that offered a way forward that would allow the agency to fill a large number of positions for the future. This process involved centralizing the recruiting and hiring of interns and using the Presidential Administration Fellows Program (PMF) to increase the pool of well-qualified candidates for HUD positions. The PMF provided graduate students from advanced degree programs the opportunity to begin their careers as a public servant in the federal sector.

The PMFs were very competitive, with various agencies competing for the best and brightest. As Director of Human Capital, the Secretary of HUD tasked me with bringing in 100 PMFs simultaneously, which was an achievement that no federal agency had ever accomplished.

To accomplish this task, using employee engagement techniques, I enlisted the support of my team and brought together various levels of my organization to brainstorm how we could meet the challenge effectively. We decided to take advantage of an upcoming PMF job fair orchestrated by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to attract PMF to work for HUD. We engage all levels of the HUD workforce to engage with us, including the Secretary and Assistant Secretary of HUD, as well as the higher levels of the organization. A large number of HUD employees participated in the job fair event, with strong representation from management representing the various departments to share what their organization did and why working for HUD was an excellent choice for the participant. of PMF.

Take action

• We circulated invitations to a recruiting “session” at HUD after the OPM job fair, informing PMFs that we were prepared to hire on the spot.

• My staffing specialists were on site to screen and submit job offers to the PMFs.

• Key HUD leadership delivered speeches that focused on HUD being the right choice for a PMF to begin a career in the federal government.

• My employees met the PMFs at the door, greeted them with a smile, offered refreshments, and demonstrated how well HUD hospitality worked.

Finally, at the end of the event, HUD employee volunteers collected surveys to evaluate the event. Feedback was extremely positive and we were able to hire 99 presidential management fellows simultaneously as a result of having a representative sample of employees involved in planning and facilitating the event.

In today’s competitive marketplace, organizations must focus more on engaging employees. Engaging employees goes beyond motivation. It is a matter of competitive advantage to know and manage talent to increase engagement. HR professionals should encourage, support, and educate managers on the importance of knowing how to increase their level of engagement to maximize productivity and profitability.