Today’s C-level executives know that an engaged workforce offers a strategic vantage point when it comes to customer engagement and better ROI.
Assembling high-performing teams require business leaders to design the right team-based business strategy, manage intentionally, and hire purposefully.
Fostering employee engagement empowers staff members to navigate the world of work and seek opportunities that impact business ROI. This article focuses on simple, scalable, productive, and readily justifiable ways to optimize your organization’s engagement.
Why Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement refers to the level of commitment and involvement an employee has towards their organization. There is a long-suspected connection between an employee’s level of engagement and performance quality.
Highly engaged employees contribute to their employer’s success by being goal and outcome-oriented. This attitude directly impacts the company’s short-term and long-term ROI through employee performance. So, how to successfully achieve employee engagement?
Business leaders must understand the relationship between higher engagement and business results with a key strategy. Take a look at the difference in performance output between companies that invest in employee engagement strategies versus the companies that do not invest.
Defining a Career Engagement Strategy to Resolve Issues
Before beginning any engagement strategy, it imperative to analyze organizational pain-points that influence a talent optimization strategy. Some common issues include:
- An unexpected increase in employee turnover and external investor interests.
- Regulatory requirements to report on diversity statistics and executive directives to increase the representation of target demographics.
- Aging employees cause succession risks.
- Low engagement levels in the key demographic employee groups.
- Lower engagement rate, even though significant roles have been filled internally.
- Talent retention and better expertise in older employees.
- Lack of employee visibility into organizational values/objectives and achieving them.
Getting Career Engagement (CE) right with the 4 C’s and 3 E’s
A combination of capability, compatibility, contribution, and communication strengthens career engagement. An ideal career engagement strategy spans across these four factors harmonizing business, managerial, and individual actions.
The 4 C’s shown below demonstrate guidelines and best practices for an exceptional employee engagement program. These actions can be launched in clusters or overtime for ease of execution.
These four foundational pillars cross three different layers of your career engagement strategy. Within any engagement strategy, there are three tiers of an initiative at play: individual empowerment, leader enablement, and organizational effectiveness. The graph below illustrates each tier’s key drivers and the outcomes for managers, individuals, and organizations. Typically outcomes include career development plans, meaningful career conversations with direct reports, and managing succession processes across several business units.
Critical Considerations for the 4Cs and 3Es of Employee Engagement
The overall impact of an employee engagement program is influenced by:
- Career engagement advocates and experts in business like mentors, coaches, managers, etc.
- Initiatives supporting broader business and HR strategy, such as:
- Staff retention programs
- Potential employee growth programs and career agility drivers.
- Succession planning to encourage an employee’s successor.
- Unique learning programs and shaped to individual career goals.
- Career pathways that create a talent pipeline for the organization.
3. Open career conversations with managers, development planning sessions, and individual goal-setting meetings.
4. Employees can access personal career progress through webinars, eLearning, and workshops, supporting their leader.
Connecting Engagement to ROI
Several studies have shown a correlation between engagement and productivity, innovation, sales, safety, retention, lower costs, better quality, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. The employee-customer-profit chain is a model that demonstrates this.
The Center for Talent Solutions quantifies Return on Employee Engagement for firms worldwide; their data demonstrates the cost vs. benefits of improved employee engagement.
CTS found that fully-engaged employees are 22% more productive than others. In contrast, disengaged employees add only half as much value to an organization and can lead to a loss of over $112 million annually. Another famous one-year study by Towers Perrin (shown below) revealed financial performance improved with structured employee engagement.
Crossing the Finish Line with Employee Engagement
Despite the challenges of employee engagement, the payoff is enormous and beyond the business bottom-line.
It is also noteworthy that a holistic approach to employee issues strengthens a company’s cultural outfit & productivity.
After all, who wouldn’t want to work every day when they love what they do?
Building engagement strategies is a marathon, and Radiant Digital is ready to help you win with an analytical assessment of your ROI. Connect with us today.