A Clear Vision for Employee Engagement

Blog-04

Blog-04

Employee engagement is often heralded as the missing link for organisational success, and with good reason. Looking at the spectrum of employee engagement, it is clear that businesses with more highly engaged staff hold the high ground both morally and monetarily compared to those with disengaged staff. Morally speaking, working in a culture of high engagement is healthier for staff, as evidenced through lower rates of unwanted absences and cases of workplace distress. Monetarily speaking, businesses with highly engaged staff are likely to experience up to 26% greater revenue per employee compared to businesses with disengaged staff.

Frustratingly for many business owners, Employee engagement can seem like a vast and sometimes mysterious concept, making it difficult to know where exactly to begin to practically increase engagement.

Employee Engagement: It starts with why
To simplify, let’s think about the behaviour of highly engaged employees. Whether in a product or service based business and regardless of official role, highly engaged employees demonstrate two key responsibilities:

  1. Design – Making sure things work as they should, identifying and correcting faults, and making suggestions for improvements.
  2. Sales – Whether that be in the sense of a traditional transactional “sale”, or in communicating the business mission and values.

Both of these key responsibilities require laser like clarity regarding a business’s reason for being. Highly engaged staff are excited to come to work because they understand their role well, and can clearly see how it fits into the bigger picture of what the business is trying to achieve. Famously if you ask a cleaner at Disneyland (the happiest place on earth) what their job is their answer isn’t picking up rubbish, it’s “to make people happy”.

Employee Engagement: The Heart of Your Business
A well-constructed vision and mission encapsulates where the business is heading as well as presenting a better version of the future for the business’s customers. Low employee engagement highlights two possible issues:

  1. The vision and mission lack clarity – The direction is murky.
  2. The vision and mission aren’t compelling – The future doesn’t look that different, or that much brighter than now.

In both cases leaders can make a significant impact.

Making it Clear
When clarifying your vision and mission aim for simplicity and move away from “corporate speak” by answering the following questions:

  1. What does your business do? – What’s the physical or psychological need you fulfill?
  2. How do you do it? What do you make or provide?
  3. Who do you serve? What do your typical customers look like?

Make it Compelling
One of the best ways to bring a business’s vision and mission to life is to help staff get up close and personal with customers, more specifically their positive experiences with the business. This can be done effectively by presenting customer feedback stories to staff highlight how their work made a difference in customers’ lives.

Employee engagement needn’t be a mystery – It’s all about clarity.

HR Business Direction can assist you to create a clear vision for employee engagement.

 

Alistair Kerr MPsychOrg; PostGradDip Psych; BPsych
Organisaitonal Development Strategist | Psychologist
alistair.kerr@hrbd.com.au
07 3890 2066
www.hrbd.com.au

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