A Quick, Comprehensive Guide to Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is important for all workers, but vital for deskless workers in particular. It determines how attentive and dedicated your team is to their tasks. In a situation where mistakes can be costly or injurious and attention is critical, employee engagement is what keeps your team in the moment and passionate about high-quality work.

Managing a deskless work environment poses a set of unique challenges. Keeping your team engaged and responsive to the system is something that every workplace strives for, but may be a matter of life, limb, and production for a manufacturing or logistics team. The managers and HR professionals of such a workforce need a unique understanding of employee engagement and how to optimize that engagement for every team across departments and tasks.

There are three types of employee engagement. A great manager makes an effort to keep their team engaged on all three levels; mental, emotional, and physical. A holistic approach is the best way to promote professional enthusiasm and prevent burnout.

Cognitive engagement Types of Employee Engagement

• Cognitive engagement keeps the minds of your team engaged with regular and varying challenges and inputs. A mentally engaged employee typically finds their work to be just the right balance between enjoyably familiar and mentally challenging. Emotional engagement

• Emotional engagement gives your team a reason to care about the company and share their sense of camaraderie with the team. This may include good coworker relationships, group events, and recognition.

Physical engagement

Physical engagement relates to wellness and physical fitness to do the job. Many jobs are expanding their level of physical engagement through benefits and workplace design.

How to Measure Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is typically measured using engagement surveys. These are quick self-assessments that ask employees how they feel about certain activities going on around them. Engagement can also be passively measured by assessing a team's general energy level, responsiveness, and interest level in assignments by comparing behavior over time.

However, it is important to use both methods to avoid both self-assessment bias and mistaken observations (ex: an employee is low-energy because they are unwell, not disengaged).

Benefits of Employee Engagement

• Increased employee performance

• Greater health and wellbeing

• Low employee turnover, longer employee loyalty • Reduction in risk and frequency of accidents

The benefits of employee engagement are known inherently by most managers and measured in results. These benefits range from increasing the performance of your team to reducing the risk of serious workplace injuries when everyone is attentive and engaged. Employees who experience employee engagement are far less likely to leave and may seek internal promotions.

Highly Engaged Employee Engagement Profiles

• Employees are enthusiastic and eager to start and complete their next assignment. Moderately Engaged

• Employees enjoy their work and remain interested from one project to the next

Barely Engaged

• Employees do the minimum amount to remain productive but show little interest in assignments or projects

Disengaged

• Employee lacks focus and may be doing the minimum to avoid reprimand. Employee engagement profiles are patterns of behavior and survey answers that indicate a person is at a certain level of engagement or a critical lack of engagement. Being able to spot employee engagement levels can help managers help individuals, track workplace stress, and design more engaging workplace environments, programs, or projects in the future.

What Employee Engagement Is Not

Employee engagement, interestingly, is not defined as motivation or job satisfaction. It doesn't relate to how happy employees are with their jobs, but rather how much they are paying attention and are involved in their jobs. This is important to note. An employee can be happy at their job, yet disengaged from goals or standards of excellence. Likewise, an employee can be engaged and attentive to their work without gaining satisfaction from the job, or an engaged employee may still be at risk of burning out without losing engagement.

Engagement is also not quite the same as employee experience. Employee experience is the workplace environment and company culture that shape the experience of each team member. However, employee engagement relates to how attentive employees are when fulfilling their role, whether the experience itself is good or bad.

Drivers of Employee Engagement

• Trust

• Mentally stimulating or challenging

• Visible mobility options and career growth opportunities • Pride in the company

• Involvement in company culture

The key drivers of employee engagement relate to trust and transparency and how well the company is allowing each person to meet their mental health needs. Engaging work is a great start, and professional development keeps everyone focused on the forward direction.

Who is Responsible for Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement has an element of responsibility at every level. HR is responsible for building systems that promote and support employee engagement, managers are responsible for implementing those systems and actively keeping their team members engaged, and employees also play a role in choosing to seek engagement over disengagement.

Employee Engagement FAQ What is meant by employee engagement?

• Employee engagement refers to how attentive and dedicated an employee is to fulfilling the goals of their task or role.

What are examples of employee engagement?

• An engaged employee may notice a safety hazard or piece of equipment out of place, where a disengaged employee may ignore these hazards.

What are the key elements of employee engagement?

• Employee engagement can be built from leadership, communication, company culture, rewards for good work, and opportunities to grow.

Why is employee engagement so important?

• Employee engagement determines how much your team is trying to succeed at the goals of their role. Engagement is a key element in achieving both productivity and employee satisfaction.

What are the foundations of employee engagement?

• Trust and respect are the foundations of employee engagement. Employees know you trust them to do the job right, and trust you in return to provide the resources and training to complete their tasks. Engagement slips when trust and mutual respect slip.

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Understanding Employee Engagement for the Benefit of Your Team As a manager, understanding employee engagement is one of the most important things you can do in terms of taking care of your team and ensuring that your department reaches your productivity quota. Whether your team handles a steady flow of work or a sequence of projects, whether you manage three people or fifty, employee engagement will shape both the performance and drive of your team and is part of the foundation of good team morale.