On Employee Engagement

Without a doubt, engaged employees are more productive employees. They will deliver beyond what is expected of them for the simple reason that they feel they are doing what they want as opposed to doing what they are told to do. According to a Gallup International survey, in 2016 only 29% of employees worldwide were actually engaged. The survey also reported that 450 million USD were lost due to disengaged employees. This is a number that surpasses a third world country’s budget! The survey also found that an organization with engaged employees would have 21% higher productivity, 22% higher profitability, 10% higher satisfaction rates, 37% lower absenteeism, and at least 25% lower employee turnover.

The case for employee engagement is a no brainer. And with numbers such as those of the Gallup survey organizational leaders are scrambling to create an environment conducive to employee engagement. Unfortunately, some organizations fall in the trap of trying to create such an environment by putting pressure on their managers, ordering them to engage with their employees and forgetting that managers also need to be engaged. When leaders employ such a tactic they may create the exact opposite of what they intended or at best keep the environment status quo.

As the Arabic saying goes (translated freely): if you don’t have it, you can’t give it! Therefore, the only pathway out of this trap is for the top leadership to deliberately:

1. Engage its managers before ordering them to engage their team members.
2. Educate the managers on the importance of employee engagement and its impact on the organizational performance as well as the departmental performance. The latter is obviously more directly related to the individual performance of the managers making a good selling point to them on the issue of employee engagement.
3. Train those managers on practical tools and techniques related to employee engagement.

Written by: Ibrahim Al Yafi – Leaders Training Institute