The Holistic Approach To Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is important to every organization. So much so, that companies spend almost $1 billion annually on efforts to measure and improve employee engagement. However, even with all this money invested into the matter, companies still fail to overcome the hurdle so many face in actually turning strategies into success.

The issue isn’t that employees can’t be engaged. Rather, it’s that most companies approach engagement entirely wrong because they assume that employees fall into one of two categories: Engaged or disengaged.

There’s much more to employee engagement than that and if you want to be successful, reframing how you think about engagement is critical. Doing so will affect your bottom line when it comes to productivity, customer satisfaction, and employee turnover. And with that, let’s get started!

Perceptions and Behaviors Don’t Always Amount to Engagement…

Too often, employers (perhaps yourself included), measure employee perceptions and behaviors to determine engagement. For example, you may consider employees who turn in their work on time as engaged, but they may not be. Likewise, you may believe that because an employee has a positive relationship with his or her direct manager, he or she is engaged, but this may not be the case either.

The problem is that no individual measurement will represent engagement accurately. This means organizations who only look to level of effort, company loyalty, or any number of other common factors as determinants are selling themselves short of what it really means for employees to be engaged.

A Holistic Approach to Engagement Has Arrived

It’s best to examine each employee individually and on a holistic basis to determine his or her level of engagement. Doing so means evaluating six key areas with regard to employee perceptions and six others with regard to self-reported behaviors.

• Employee Perceptions: Company leadership, management, culture, job function, management, and total rewards.
• Self-Reported Behaviors: Personal development, recreation, temperament, relationships, company loyalty, and level of effort.

Let’s take an example to explain how this works. Assume you have an employee, John, who views his manager in a positive way but only puts in the minimal level of effort, refuses to assist colleagues, and isn’t interested in ongoing training and development opportunities. If you were to only measure employees based on relationships with superiors, John would appear engaged, but he isn’t.

By evaluating each employee in this way, you will obtain specific information that allows you to make measurable, specific changes to better support any reform you’re looking to enact around the office.

Take Employee Engagement a Step Further With Flock

While the elements described above are important, there are other factors that influence employee engagement as well, one of which is benefits. When you want to offer employees 24/7 access to benefits, Flock is the answer. The best part is that it also keeps you compliant with federal and state regulations, tracks employee time off, and offers in-office social network support and a centralized place to store employee information.

Sign up for free today to enjoy these benefits and step up employee engagement one step further, no matter the current level!

Share your thoughts: Have you ever considered measuring employee engagement in this way before? Why or why not? Do you believe it’s a useful strategy? We look forward to your comments below!

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