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Employee engagement – why does it matter?
Large consultancies and survey providers (such as Hay Group, Gallup, Kenexa and Towers Watson) will answer that employee engagement drives individual and company performance. The less traditional challengers (such as CultureAmp, TinyPulse and RoundPegg) will emphasize recognition, happiness or the speed of real-time analytics. Authors and experts in the field will refer to discretionary effort, employee hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1954), or intellectual and emotional attachment to work (Heger, 2007).
Reasons may vary but there is consensus on one point: employee engagement remains important. In the rapidly changing economic and corporate landscape, the ability of organizations to understand their people and the factors driving engagement is crucial.
Traditional engagement measurement is maturing. Next Generation organizations are experimenting with ways to improve their engagement practices and actively drive engagement linked to business performance.
The authors’ personal experiences managing engagement within organizations and subsequently hearing the ‘need for change’ though our consulting practice at Better Business, motivated us to ask ourselves some tough questions. “Why don’t employee engagement survey results help us to create real change? How can organizations move from insights to solutions?” These questions inspired us to undertake research to discover the next evolution in the engagement field.
Our research* showed that organizations are moving away from traditional annual engagement surveys and trying to find flexible ways to gain meaningful and immediate employee insights. There is a clear trend towards dramatically more employee participation in the entire engagement process, which is increasingly supported by technology.
In our view there is an unprecedented opportunity to truly engage employees in a much more participative engagement process that is linked to purpose and strategy.
In the published themes from our research we will share results from our findings and latest next generation thinking in four key areas.
What is the future of employee engagement and employee opinion surveys?
We interviewed leaders and experts working in multinational corporations, start-ups, government agencies and the non-profit sector. We heard about the challenges facing organizations in a disruptive business environment, and the critical importance of engaged employees in driving the necessary change. Our research revealed so many valuable insights that we have summarised it into a series of published themes:
Each published theme will provide:
We don’t focus on increasing ‘engagement scores’ we now focus on using timely insights from
our people to empower them to deliver our strategy”
Interview participant
“It’s the dialogue in itself that’s the most valuable part of the whole process”
Interview participant
“Survey is good but you should have it every week or when you need it…
in a real time scenario you need real time opportunities for feedback and quick results”
Interview participant