Operational Excellence System: Employee Engagement Measurement

To be successful every member of the organisation should be focused in one direction and that is demonstrated by the level of employees and management engagement in their work. Research indicates that only 20 percent of employees and management are fully engaged in their work, 30 percent are not fully engaged and 50 percent are totally disengaged in their work. This means only 20 percent of employees are contributing meaningful value required to achieve set performance targets and goals and the rest of employees are source of cost to the organisation. If this is converted to monetary terms, then 80 percent of the organisation budget is wasted on paying salaries of employees who are present at work but absent in their mind, productivity cost and increasing cost of waste in the system like re- work, stagnation, defects, delays and compensating customer cases. Further studies conducted illustrate that 85 percent of engaged employees remain loyal to the organisation and they are able to increase the business profit by 19 percent on an annual basis. Conversely, employees who are disengaged on their work decline business profit by 33 percent because of customer dissatisfaction and disengagement due to low quality products and services. Although, employees’ engagement is influenced by extrinsic factors such as participation and involvement of employees in decision making, quality of life, leadership style, culture, salary and working environment there are employees who are naturally autotelic and conscientious that makes them to be naturally engaged in their job. Management are advised to select these kinds of employees during recruitment and selection. The common red flags of organisations with disengaged employees are consistent poor performance, poor team work, customer dissatisfaction, lack of change, absenteeism, presentism, persistent organisational problems, poor culture, employee conflicts and complaints. In Botswana context, it is estimated that close to 60 percent of workers are disengaged in their work. This has been ongoing for many years because only 2 percent of organisations conduct employee engagement surveys to identify causes of disengagement and close them. This week’s article defines what employee engagement is, its benefits and how it is measured. Employee engagement is the extent to which employees are satisfied with their jobs, demonstrate loyalty and commitment in their work by coming up with intelligent ways to add value in creating a high performing organisation. Operational excellence system requires employees who can demonstrate positive discretionary behaviour and use their full potential to improve business bottom line, customer satisfaction and loyalty, manager self- efficacy, and improved adaptation to change. In addition to the above assertion, research indicates that engaged employees are able to perform 20 percent better than other employees and they provide leadership to others. A research conducted by IES consultancy found out that engaged employees subscribe to the organisation vision, goals, values and have understanding of the organisation philosophy, respect everyone and are up to date with new developments in their field. This implies that rather than focusing on motivating employees, it is better to focus on ensuring that all employees are fully engaged on their work because that is how to build a culture of excellence. It is imperative in the current competitive world to measure the level of employees’ engagement in their work and some of the tools used are The Gallup Workplace Audit, Employees Attitude Surveys, Work Centrality Scale, Work Alienation Scale, Maslach Burnout Inventory, Utrecht Work Engagement Scale and Culture Amp. All of these tools use specific employees engagement indicators and the most common indicators that can be adopted in any organisation employee engagement measurement scale are; organisational citizenship, level of alignment of employees and organisational values, level of employees commitment, enabling environment to perform, trust between employees and management, job clarity, recognition and praise, work relationships, continuous learning and it is important to link these indicators to organisational outcomes like customer loyalty and engagement, business bottom- line, employees’ retention, change, innovation and productivity.

The scale that the organisation uses should pass the reliability and validity test so that the outcomes of the survey can be factual and useful in continually improving the human aspect of the operational system. Moreover, it is recommended that organisations should replace employees’ satisfaction surveys with employees’ engagement surveys because employee satisfaction is one of the expected outcomes of this survey and it should be done on a yearly basis. If all employees are engaged in their work, they will exceed the customer expectations and improve the business bottom- line. The Author is a member of African Excellence Forum, Holds Master of Science Degree in Strategic Management and is a Certified Manager of Quality and Organisational Excellence from America Society for Quality. Six Sigma Greenbelt, ISO 9001: 2015 Certified. Contact: 72211182, Website: www. iqm. co. bw

Email: veronmosalakatane@ gmail. com LinkedIn: Veron Mosalakatane