Employee engagement is a crucial piece of the recruiting and retaining top talent puzzle, especially in today’s job market. In 2021, an average of 3.98 million workers quit their jobs each month; with virtually no industry spared from the impacts of the Great Resignation, now is an essential time to focus on keeping your people engaged and excited about coming to work.
We all know it’s easy to come to work when you love your job, who you work with, and who you work for! When it comes to employee engagement, you have to know there is a massive difference between low and high engagement. With low engagement, employees don’t care about outcomes, absences are high, and there isn’t a high degree of investment or responsibility. Those employees could also actively tear down what the company is trying to build, which breeds further distrust in the organization.
With high employee engagement, you get the opposite! You’ll have employees giving discretionary effort – and that’s the difference-maker. They are doing things to make the workplace better and make experiences better for coworkers and customers. Most importantly, they care, have an owner mentality, and often see the bigger picture.
Overall, there are three core pillars of employee engagement. You have to have all three of the following elements intact to drive employee engagement:
- First, I can trust my leader.
- Additionally, I feel valued by the company (often through pay, benefits, and mutual trust).
- Finally, I experience job fulfillment (I love what I do and enjoy who I work with).
You’ll have low employee engagement and high turnover if employees don’t have those three things. Leaders with highly engaged employees are free to do their jobs without refereeing drama, micromanaging, or spinning their wheels in hiring. Leaders can empower their people to be high performers, which creates a sense of pride and accomplishment in their work and fuels the high employee engagement cycle. And that’s why it matters!
