The 14 Keys of Employee Engagement

Posted by David Zinger on October 6, 2009

14 Keys of Employee Engagement
“You sort of smell it, don’t you, that engagement of people as people. What goes on in meetings, how people talk to each other. You get the sense of energy, engagement, commitment, belief in what the organisation stands for,” is how Lord Currie, former Chair of the Office of Communications (Ofcom) and Dean of Cass Business School, puts it. From the United Kingdom MacLeod Report: “Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance through Employee Engagement”.

Employee Engagement, as a term, has been around since the 1990’s and has recently gathered exponentially increased attention. The United Kingdom just released the above-mentioned MacLeod Report: Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance through Employee Engagement to bring engagement to the top of everyone’s agenda. The United States government released two reports entitled The Power of Federal Engagement and Managing for Engagement. A Google search of employee engagement 2 years ago found about 300,000 resources while a Google search of employee engagement today revealed 1,640,000 resources.
So what is engagement? Employee engagement is a lot like love. You don’t have to wear a ring and always love your job but employee engagement and love are defined in so many different ways. Each consulting company seems to have their own definition. Some seem to define it as feeling good about your company, some define it as getting more discretionary effort from employees and some define it as a high response to 12 questions that include having a friend and getting feedback.

The Zinger definition of engagement :Employee engagement is the art and science of engaging people in authentic and recognized connections to strategy, roles, performance,
organization, community, relationship, customers, development, energy, and happiness
to leverage, sustain, and transform work into results.