There are different levels of employee engagement
In the last 12 months, the concept of achieving happiness has been high on the Middle East agenda. There has been a lot of talk around providing a nurturing environment for the happiness of a person, family and community.
The question is; how can organisations contribute towards creating a happier working environment and achieving a win-win result for both their employees and their bottom-line? Is it about employee happiness, engagement or both?
Happiness is not engagement
Although there is a clear link between the two, happiness is not engagement. Traditionally organisations have attempted to assess their employees’ happiness through satisfaction surveys, to measure the work climate and determine what can be done to better motivate and retain them.
However, organisations realised that actions taken to only increase happiness did not result in the desired behaviour change or improvements in turnover, productivity or business performance.
Leading organisations sought a more quantitative and robust approach to link employee attitude measures with behaviour and business measures. This led to the methodology we now know as employee engagement, defined as the level of an employee’s emotional and psychological investment in their organisation, reflecting the employee’s willingness to “say” positive things about the organisation, “stay” for a long time and “strive” to give their best efforts to help the organisation succeed.
“We pay our employees high salaries as compared to the market, so we are confident they will not leave. Our employees are certainly engaged, right?” Wrong … An employee might be happy with certain elements of the workplace, which lead to their retention. For example, a manager who is paid a generous salary might be happy with his rewards and recognition and therefore won’t be actively looking for a job elsewhere. However, this does not mean he is going to say positive things about the organisation, stay for a long time and strive to give his best efforts.
Even if he was happy with his salary, he might still speak negatively about the firm to the external recruiters (reflecting low say behaviour), have the willingness to change jobs for a minimal increase in salary (reflecting low stay behaviour) and remain excessively concerned with leaving work on time even during busy periods (reflecting low strive behaviour).
Regardless of this employee’s specific happiness with the rewards and recognition he is receiving, such displayed poor behaviours would negatively affect business outcomes.
Effective workplace
To drive business outcomes, employees need to be happy with the entire work experience.
Aon Hewitt has identified 15 dimensions critical to having an effective workplace — overall happiness/satisfaction with these dimensions will in turn drive employees’ engagement and consequently the business outcomes. These dimensions are employee value proposition (EVP), brand, career opportunities, collaboration, diversity and inclusion, empowerment, enabling infrastructure, learning and development, supervision, performance management, rewards and recognition, senior leadership, talent and staffing, work tasks, and work-life balance.
What differentiates best employers from the general market organisations is their ability to drive overall happiness/ satisfaction with all the dimensions while the general market organisations are usually able to deliver only on few of these dimensions.
What can be controlled and influenced with appropriate effort is how employees show up for work and how effectively they are enabled to get their work done. That is one of the main reasons why organisations that value their employees and treat them as their most important asset are:
Ensuring that they are creating an overall happy work experience, capable of driving employee engagement and business performance.
Creating “continuous listening” strategies to have a full understanding of the employee experience starting from the initial stages of recruitment and orientation all the way through to exit.