Employee Engagement

Employee engagement

What is it and why is it important?

Employee Engagement refers to an enhanced sense of well-being among employees who as a result expend more of their discretionary effort in the attainment of your business goals. Employees who have good quality jobs, are managed well and whose roles have purpose and meaning will be happier, healthier and more engaged with the overall business vision.

Organisations that enjoy high levels of Employee Engagement experience a team who give their best every day and who are committed to your business success.

Employee engagement is based on trust, integrity, two way commitment and communication between your business and your team. It is an approach that increases the chances of business success, contributing to organisational and individual performance, productivity and well-being.

How do we improve Employee Engagement?

Purpose – First and foremost your organisation will need a sense of purpose. What are you about? Where are you going? Why are you going there? How are you going to get there? Have you shared your vision?

Research shows that clearly defined goals that are written down, shared freely and reviewed regularly increases everyone’s understanding about the expectations of performance and therefore more and better quality work gets done. Goals create alignment, clarity and job satisfaction.

Once you have identified this purpose (ideally with your team), it then needs to be published, clearly and transparently.

Meaningful work – When we give people more autonomy, decision making power, time and support they perform better, which naturally means that the business performs better. People are more connected with work that has meaning and a role that has a purpose. People like to know how they fit and what the impact is of what they do on the overall success of your business.
Great Leadership and Management – You and your managers are the most important engagement capability that you have as you create internal process, set goals, provide daily support, coach for high performance and encourage the giving and receiving of quality feedback.

A coaching culture is closely correlated with good business performance, overall engagement and retention. At LMHR coaching underpins everything that we do and we actively work with our clients and their managers to support and develop a coaching culture.

Employee Voice – this is the means by which employees communicate their views to their employer and influence matters that affect them at work. Being heard results in employees feeling valued, experiencing greater job satisfaction, having greater involvement and influence and better opportunities for development. Effective employee voice builds open and trustful relationships and people are more likely to be committed to your organisation as a result.

How do we measure levels of engagement in order to improve them?

One way of ‘testing the temperature’ of an organisation is to run an organisation specific Employee Engagement Survey that is aligned to the business objectives and which has at its heart a desire to understand what is going well, and what needs some attention.

LMHR works closely with you to understand your business needs in order to create a bespoke set of questions that will truly capture the feedback that will start to form the blueprint of future initiatives.

Another way is to run one to one clinics, offering employees the opportunity to discuss their thoughts in a confidential meeting with an impartial external consultant. This offers a two dimensional element to the feedback with the opportunity to clarify information and discuss issues in more depth.

The resulting feedback from either the survey or the clinics is treated sensitively and confidentially. It produces anonymous ‘themes’ which identify where in the business there is work to be done, and often what initiatives would most effectively address those needs.

We will process all the feedback, create a report that identifies the themes and present you with recommendations for next steps.

Praise for LMHR ConsultingI found Louise to be great to work with, very friendly and personal, she understood what our goals were and helped us to achieve them – all the while putting everything into laymen’s terms and not confusing me with legal jargon! I will definitely turn to Louise for future HR support.Praise for LMHR Consulting
Kelly Draper, Internal Operations Director, Yellow Fish Event Management