Employee engagement is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organisation and its goals. This emotional commitment means engaged employees care about their work and their company.

Employee engagement is a workplace approach resulting in the right conditions for all members of an organisation to give of their best each day, committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, with an enhanced sense of their own well-being.

‘Neural basis of engagement can be defined by the average levels of activation of the brain’s reward & self-regulation circuitry when thinking about or participating in their work.’ (Rock and Tang 2009)

Business challenges

  • Current economic conditions are challenging for organisations. People are often asked to do far more with far less.
  • Significant fear and uncertainty kick in with constant change, information overload, learning new IT systems and company restructures, whilst still delivering the original KPI targets.
  • Leaders are ultimately responsible for setting the engagement level. A high level of engagement & leveraging the collective brain of your people to solve more complicated obstacles is key for business success.

Are you curious to discover insights that will get your organisation to reach its purpose?

‘9 out 10 businesses have a strategy but are not achieving it. It is how well you execute it through your people’. Institute Performance Management.

In my experience, many leaders are struggling to reach their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) through their people. Every year there is a bigger mountain to climb and the same way you climbed the last one may not suffice year after year.

So what are the key ingredients for success?

  • Creating a strong team culture starts with engaged employees.
  • Engaged employees are happier at work, get more done, and routinely go above and beyond what is required of them.
  • They encourage their co-workers to be more engaged and productive.
  • Most importantly, these employees are proud to be a part of their companies.
  • A lot of factors need to be considered for employee engagement as no two brains are the same.

Atlassian, an Australian based collaboration software company, has been rated as one of the top 10 companies to work for with an average of 87% employee engagement.

The building blocks required

These 9 elements are the building blocks of an entirely different operating system for a sustainable business with engaged employees.

  1. Purpose Alignment
  2. Mastery
  3. Autonomy
  4. Leadership diversity
  5. Intrinsic motivation
  6. Reward & recognition
  7. FUN
  8. Fairness
  9. Emphasis on understanding the context

Examples of using autonomy in an organisation

  1. Atlassian an Australian software company provided 24 hours for engineers to work on anything they wanted & present it to the next All hands meeting. 1 day of intense autonomy has produced an array of software fixes and innovations.
  2. Google does a similar thing, spending 20% of engineer time of developing new innovative solutions like Gmail & Google news.  Productivity goes up, work engagement goes up, work satisfaction goes up and staff turnover goes down.

Imagine what would the results look like if something similar was done across all of your departments on a regular basis?

If the Australian average staff engagement is 54% reported by Gallup Research, what does your organisation look like?