What is employee engagement?

There are a zillion definitions of what employee engagement is and if you type this question on Google you will get about 2,24,00,000 results in about 0.43 seconds.
That said, I would still like to add my 2 bits 🙂
In my opinion highly engaged employees have 2 things working for them – the organisation & their manager.

Engagement with the Organisation

An employee feels that he/she is engaged when the employee receives adequate communication from the leadership team. He also feels that he is being treated with respect and the Organisation is fair in the way they treat all their employees. The organisation should be able to provide him challenging work that utilises his competencies effectively.

Engagement with the Manager

An employee feels that he/she is engaged with their Managers when the manager cares about them as an individual and respects them as a professional. Employees like to work with Managers who give them feedback, treat them fairly, communicate effectively and provide adequate support.
AceNgage recently conducted a survey to find out expectations employees have from Organisations and their Managers and the results are published below:

EXPECTATIONS FROM THE ORGANISATION:

Based on this analysis, if Organisations were to focus on the top 3 expectations (50%) they would witness a significant improvement in overall employee engagement levels.

Right work fitment

It starts with the kind of people organisations hire. Spending extra time explaining the role and giving the employee a fair idea of the culture of the company will help immensely. Organisations should remember they’s rather not hire someone than to hire them, train and then see the employee leave.

Learning & development

Most organisations have a fairly evolved training calendar drawn out calendar. However a lot of employees during the exit surveys tell us that they felt they were not learning anything new. The problem we understand is that Managers don’t release their team members to attend these programs, as they are worried about the work in hand. This attitude needs to change. Managers should encourage and in fact support their team members by having a plan in place so that work doesn’t suffer. Not sending them could actually end up being counter productive.

Salary as per market standards

While Salary is never the biggest reasons for employees to leave, it can be an irritant. Organisations should make an effort to ensure they do a calibration exercise every now and then so that they are in the right band. Sooner or later it will become a point of discussion across the organisation and its never worth the trouble.

MANAGER RELATED REASONS THAT CAUSE EMPLOYEE ATTRITION:

These are fairly self-explanatory and I am not going to dwell on them. Managers should realise the impact they have on their team managers. Being conscious itself is a good start .
Please do let me know what you think ….