The correlation between business with a highly engaged workforce and those with superior financial performance is well document and the case reasonably solid but is it the foundation of a successful business or a dangerous distraction?
Employee engagement is both a lag and a lead indicator. If engagement scores are low, it’s a lead indicator that future business performance will be poor but as a lag indicator, the business probably has a whole bunch of performance challenges already. So, what’s the answer? Well there are other indicators that fall into two groups: those that measure the symptoms of poor engagement; high employee turnover, high absenteeism, low productivity etc, and there are those may shine light on the causes but are harder to measure and provide the foundations for success: employees understanding of the strategy and how they contribute to it, appropriate skills in the workforce, the right IT tools etc. Whilst the first group are also lag indicators, they are easy to measure and should give useful early insights into how engaged the workforce is. Initiatives to improve these important challenges will be the ones that are likely to target the causes of the poor engagement and may well involve the foundations in the second list. So, engagement is important and should be kept in the mind, but it is an outcome that is both an indicator of future performance and a lag indicator of business challenges. Business leaders should focus on the lag indicators that are the symptoms of poor engagement, address those through initiative that ensure the real foundations are in place and employee engagement will be on the up.
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The overwhelming majority of people want to do a good job. They want to be successful; they want to support their colleagues, they want to feel that they have achieved something during their working day, they want to be recognised and rewarded as a good employee. It doesn’t always feel that way and managers get frustrated with people in their teams who appear to have an approach that is at odds with this statement, but how many of the people you know well really think differently? I certainly don’t know anyone who is happy with not being successful at work.
So, where does the desire to do well and actual performance diverge? This is a key question for managers and leaders to ask when considering peoples performance and if they come at it from a perspective of ‘This person wants to be successful: what is stopping them?’, the way they approach conversations may be very different. What are the obstacles to success today? Is it skills, lack of understanding of what is required or organisational issues? Are there things happening at home that are causing problems? These are just a few of the things that interfere with good performance. Conversations that enable honest and open discussion about these challenges and how they can be overcome are the important ones to have. They are the conversations that will lead individuals and through them, the business, to be successful. So leaders, start with believing that your team wants to be successful, then all you have to do is work out how to enable that success. |
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