What does 'employee engagement' MEAN to your business?

Culture to Engage
Tips, examples, and how-to insights to grow the employee engagement culture you want for your company, brought to you by Tim Wright, MBA.

Between encouragement and engagement April 22, 2009

What does employee engagement mean to your business?

We're not talking "what's the value of employee engagement?" We're talking what does it mean? How do you define it? When you and your people talk about it, is everyone on the same page?

It's critical to know your business's meaning of employee engagement.

Here are just 3 good reasons:

Don't waste money. A portion of every dollar you spend to stimulate employee engagement is wasted if you have not clearly defined the nature, structure, shape and size of employee engagement you want as a result.

Don't waste time. Read the above statement; substitute "hour" for"dollar". Time is money.

Don't waste motivation. Your people get excited and eager to engage. Then they realize the type of engagement, the reason for the engagement, the results of the engagement are not clear. Not clear for you or them.

You want to have a clear, even measurable, awareness of what employee engagement looks like, what it is, what it does, what it provides. Here are 3 steps to get you there

• As a group (to insure common understanding) leadership/management specify what is the business's success: profit, earnings, expenses, market share,
  recognition, customer loyalty...
• Leadership/management discuss how each department, function, job contributes to achieving the success.
• Management and employee representatives name observable signs of an employee's full engagement in contributing. They also name observable signs of your entire employee base full engagement.