First Engage Yourself: So You Want to Engage Your Employees?

By Zane Safrit

Leaders lead by example. Before you ask your employees to engage, before your survey them for their engagement, before you meet about their engagement … first engage yourself.

"Well-begun is well-done." Whether you are the CEO, an entry-level employee arriving on the first day or anyone in-between. you can take these steps to first engage yourself. By doing so you'll be able to follow the simple maxim of every successful leader: lead by example.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483556130

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.¹

- Dr. Albert Einstein²

Business books rarely start with quotes from either Einstein or about insanity.

However, we’re talking about employee engagement ( actually its lack) and its desperate need for a new approach. Because the current strategies and tactics outlined in millions of posts and PowerPoint slides and meetings is starting to resemble Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity. He defined it as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

March of 2015, I found 5000 books with employee engagement. Reading one book a week, you would need almost 100 years to read them all. Yes, I added two to those numbers. More about that later. I also searched Google for the same term and found 20 million results in . 05 seconds.

What are their results?

Not much. Jim Clifton, Chairman of the Gallup Organization, wrote:

The problem is, employee engagement in America isn’t budging. Of the country’s roughly 100 million full-time employees, an alarming 70 million (70%) are either not engaged at work or are actively disengaged. That number has remained stagnant since Gallup began tracking the U.S. working population’s engagement levels in 2000. Talk about a lost decade.³

What’s that cost us?

The same Jim Clifton estimated in Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace Report Gallup that the problem of disengagement is costing the U.S. an estimated $450 to $550 billion ⁴ per year. Imagine what it’s costing your company.

Clearly, a new perspective is needed because the current one is insane and the ROI for inspiring greater degrees of employee engagement is insanely positive. According to an article published at Workforce titled Companies Recognizing Importance of Recognition⁵:

[A] 2012 study by the consultancy Aon Hewitt examined the link between corporations’ financial performance and employee engagement and found a 1 percentage point increase in employees who became engaged resulted in a 0.6 percent growth in sales.

Let’s do some easy math with those numbers. Real quick, I know you’re busy.

Let’s assume that employee engagement in your group is average. So, 30% of your employees are engaged; 17-19% are actively disengaged stealing, undermining coworkers, alienating customers. The rest, about 50% are zombies, merely going through the motions of their job.

A year later your employee engagement scores jump to 40%. Using Aon Hewitt’s ratio of 1:.6 you should expect to see your sales grow an additional 6 percentage points.

Now that I have your attention, let’s consider the possibilities.

[C]ompanies with world-class engagement have 3.9 times the earnings per share growth rate compared to their competitors with lower engagement.⁶

The authors of The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work⁷ found companies with high levels of employee engagement as compared to their competitors saw these results:

Revenue Growth is 150% higher

Profitability is 40% higher

Productivity is