Employee Engagement for Leaders

The Essential Elements to Employee Engagement

​One of the most pressing objectives of any leader in a corporate setting is to add value to their organization. To do so in a meaningful way can be a very difficult process that involves a myriad of efforts and continuous adjustments. Particularly in a suffering economic climate, every attainable source of added value represents an opportunity that no firm can afford to forego. One major, often overlooked opportunity to add value to an organization is to engage every possible member of its workforce.

Engaged employees are, by definition, “actively involved” in their work, and are valuable assets to their respective firms for a variety of reasons; they reduce overall turnover and inefficiency costs and raise overall productivity and profitability levels. Typically, an engaged worker is an individual who goes above and beyond the call of duty to deliver outstanding work quality and results with little guidance needed from management. Engaged employees most often display enthusiasm and positivity related to their work. Providing exceptional service to customers, exercising initiative to complete difficult tasks, taking ownership of work responsibilities, offering assistance to coworkers, and showing willingness to take on new challenges are common behaviors displayed by engaged employees with consistency. Countless leaders spend an exasperating amount of time, effort, and resources attempting to train unengaged employees to adopt just one of any of the aforementioned behavioral habits; if leaders instead focused their time and energy on engaging their employees, the desired habits would naturally develop.

Though there is no model approach to engaging employees, as all people and organizations are unique, research suggests that there are several essential actions that leaders can take that have proven to boost employee engagement levels. Each essential action will be optimally-effective only if it is simultaneously...