Developing and Sustaining Employee Engagement
To foster a culture of engagement, HR should lead the way in the design, measurement and evaluation of proactive workplace policies and practices that help attract and retain talent with skills and competencies necessary for growth and sustainability.
THE ROLE OF MANAGERS
Middle managers play a key role in employee engagement, creating a respectful and trusting relationship with their direct reports, communicating company values, and setting expectations for the day-to-day business of any organization.
Studies show that people leave managers, not companies, and ensuring managers are actively participating in and managing employee engagement is paramount.
But middle managers need to be empowered by being given larger responsibilities, trained for their expanded roles and more involved in strategic decisions. If an organization's executives and HR professionals want to hold managers accountable for the engagement levels, they should:
Make sure that managers and employees have the tools to do their jobs correctly.
Periodically assign managers larger, more exciting roles.
Give managers appropriate authority.
Accelerate leadership development efforts.
Ask managers to convey the corporate mission and vision and to help transform the organization.
How to Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement
To increase employee engagement levels, employers should give careful thought to the design of engagement initiatives.
GENERAL GUIDELINES
As HR professionals consider adopting or modifying practices or initiatives to increase employee engagement, they should:
Make sound investments. The organization should consider the strategic implications of various HR practices and determine which are more important and merit greater investment to enhance engagement levels.
Develop a compelling business case. HR professionals should be able to demonstrate how these investments have led to positive, measurable business outcomes for the organization or other businesses.
Consider unintended consequences. When evaluating alternatives for redesigning HR practices to foster employee engagement, think about the likely impact of the revised policies. Are there potentially unintended, unfavorable consequences that may occur based on the impact of that change on employees in different circumstances and life situations?
Base investment decisions on sound data. Employee engagement should be measured annually. Survey items should be linked to the organization's key performance measures, such as profitability, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Outcomes of employee engagement research should include the identification of the highest-impact engagement levers and survey items that differentiate top-performing business units from less successful units.
Create an "engagement culture." This can be done by communicating the value of engagement in the mission statement and executive communications, ensuring that business units implement their engagement action plans, monitoring progress, adjusting strategies and plans as needed, and recognizing and celebrating progress and results.
Targeted communication initiatives can enable managers and HR professionals to stay on top of employee engagement issues, get ongoing feedback from employees and anticipate changing needs of workgroups. Managers and HR professionals should take advantage of opportunities to engage employees and should use varied communication methods to do so.
References:
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/sustainingemployeeengagement.aspx