| Topic: | The 15 Drivers of Employee Engagement |
What are the most influential drivers of engagement in your organization?
The NY Times headline, “Do Happier People Work Harder?”, is somewhat misleading – substituting the word “happier” for “positively engaged.” Nonetheless, the Harvard findings contained therein generally substantiate what we have learned from conducting millions of employee surveys:
#1) Hard working people who can see progress of their work are positively engaged at work and generally happier with their lives outside of work (SOWB);
#2) If you want an employee to be positively engaged, match them/inspire them with an engaging job to do.
What the study and article fail to scratch the surface on, is the most important fact in the TQM and engageonomics of employee engagement. There are 15 universal and influenceable drivers of engagement that determine employee engagement level.
Much confusion about employee engagement arises from spot researchers’ and journalists’ focus on engagement “characteristics” drawn from managers’ observations and workplace events rather than bona fide “components” based on the long term study of attitudes gathered from actual employees whose perspectives are developed from their own personal experiences. There is a huge difference between talking about the color and trim characteristics of your car rather than understanding the internal set of synchronized components that make it run which can be influenced by good maintenance management. This attention on looks and not mechanics cause most organizations to constantly repaint their employee engagement exteriors while their business becomes more sluggish. The result is two consecutive quarters of declining US productivity.
Squishy engagement definitions and short term engagement research, like those used in the Harvard study drawn from 669 manager opinions and observed workday events, perpetuate the disengagement crisis and cause employees to lose faith. Employee engagement is about a set of attitudinal factors formed on the inside not the looks of “happiness” on the outside. White papers at www.ScarlettSurveys.com