Keep Your Star Employees.

From CNN/Fortune last fall, but  no less relevant in today’s business environment.

You doled out extra vacation days to make up for paltry bonuses to your top performers. After the 401(k) match was cut, you passed out gift cards to remind your stars how much they mattered. In a tough economy, it's the little things, right?

Wrong. Perks and trinkets are nice, but they won't keep your best people when things improve. Some 27% of employees deemed "high potential" said they plan to leave within the year, according to a recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board. That rate of dissatisfaction is rising "precipitously" as the economy stabilizes, says Jean Martin, executive director of the CEB's Corporate Leadership Council, up from just 10% in 2006 and increasing at twice the rate of the general employee population.

That's the bad news. The good news is that perks aren't the only way to keep your high performers engaged. They want a mix of recognition and challenges that stretch them without completely stressing them out. Liz Wiseman, a former Oracle executive and author of the bestseller Multipliers, says money "never came up" when she interviewed 75 Fortune 500 managers about the leaders who motivated them most.

Read the complete article on CNN Money.

Employee Engagement -----> Customer Satisfaction -----> Organizational Strength

Engaged employees are the essence of “Insightlink” – a connection that can make or break an organization’s revenue growth and profitability. Without this “Insightlink” (engaged employees performing in an engaging manner resulting in customers responding more loyally) profits and future growth can be compromised or even cease to be.

The Insightlink is basically the bridge – whether it has the strength of a chain or the precariousness of a thin thread – that correlates employee engagement to an organization's strength, most typically financial strength.

Employee Engagement ----> Customer Satisfaction -----> Organizational Strength

Discerning who is an engaged employees is actually more challenging than one may think. Defining engaged employees requires looking at results of all employees in context. Among the reasons organizations choose Insightlink is for its expertise and independently-commissioned benchmark norms. Based on experience, Insightlink can tell you that engagement is not only crucial for the employees with direct customer contact – it’s also important for behind-the-scenes employees who indirectly impact an organization’s revenue and profitability by the way they support managers and other employees.

You may be surprised to hear that improved customer satisfaction is linked to cost savings and revenue gains so organizations can predict and even measure the return on investment from action planning goals stemming from employee engagement survey results. Bottom line: Employee engagement surveys and strategic actions based on quality engagement surveys are a sound investment for the organization and its customers.

Before you dive in, know that key players from top management to HR points of contact need to be on board. Organizational success on relies on successful communications and needs to ensure that employees:

Grasp the purpose of your employee-engagement initiative
Understand the financial goals of the initiative
Clearly understand how senior management is committed to a survey that supports an employee engagement-customer response-organizational growth model

5 Leadership Inputs into Employee Engagement

http://davidzinger.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/5-leadership-inputs-into-employee-engagement-mmp-27/

Key inputs into employee engagement from leaders and managers within the organization:

1. Engage yourself. Before you can foster or enhance the engagement of employees, never lose sight that you are one of those employees. Keep a focus on your own levels of employee engagement as you also champion engagement for others.
2. Hold engaging conversations. Avoid making employee engagement an announcement or policy. Ensure your employee engagement has a grass roots conversational quality to it. Talk with your employees. Doc Searls talking about
   conversational marketing stated: conversations are about talking, not announcing. They’re about listening, not surveying. They’re about paying attention, not getting attention. In many ways, employee engagement is less about what you put in and more about what you draw out of employees.
3. Be strong and strengthen others. Employees who work from their strengths and have work designed around their strengths are more engaged. As leaders, we must also talk with people about their strengths. There are many pathways to strengths.
4. Apply the simple and significant. I am passionate about employee engagement and believe it makes a huge difference for all in the workplace and I recognize how many things the average leader must attend to. It is not my intention to make employee engagement an imposition in an already overcrowded day. I encourage you to find the simplest yet most significant thing you can do to advance employee engagement.
5. Engage the clutch. My experience with the majority of leaders in organizations is that they respond to the full slate of demands with an excess of engagement and hours worked. We must regularly engage the clutch and go to neutral. Engaged leaders also find time for rest, recovery, and renewal. The path to full engagement also involves periods of disengagement — our walk to the desert for renewal.