Increasing Engagement

Employee engagement refers to the emotional commitment employees feel toward their organization and its goals, resulting in motivated, proactive, and loyal team members. A client in the transportation and logistics industries that we worked with for several years was having a problem with employee engagement. One of the first tasks with the company was to survey the entire workforce with a customized employee survey that we created with the HR team.

We needed to determine what the baseline level of employee engagement was before we could address anything else. We also needed to understand the problem areas so they could be addressed. Through the engagement survey, we (the internal HR team and myself ) identified the areas with lower scores, which included employee communications, rewards and recognition, leadership trust, and understanding company strategy. We then shared the results with employees as a way to promote healthy engagement. Even if there are poor results, company executives need to be transparent and share them with employees. We discussed the results and then people volunteered to be part of teams composed of employees who wanted to help address the issues. Managers and executives were not included so the teams could work without outside bias from leaders or fear of retribution.

The company has distributed the engagement survey every eighteen months since it began five years ago. The engagement scores have continually increased, starting at 38 percent in year one and rising to 53 percent at the last survey. The employee turnover rate has decreased from 19 percent to 12 percent, and revenue and profitability have both increased in the last three years.

Of course, the positive financial numbers could have been due to many factors, but employee engagement would be a key reason why the top and bottom line numbers have improved. The company continues to look for ways to improve its engagement scores since they have shown that higher employee engagement scores can drive key metrics that lead to better financial results. More engaged employees are more productive and that increased productivity leads to better financial performance and higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Excerpt from Chapter Ten of People Are Your Profit by Mark Mitford, MA, MBA