In a previous blog, I wrote about how important employee engagement is based on the findings from a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement Survey. In the conclusion of the survey, SHRM found that the more employees are positively engaged, the more happy employees a company is likely to retain. But how do we engage our employees?
During my research to answer that question, I found an excellent gallup.com article titled “Five Ways to Improve Employee Engagement Now” written by Robyn Reilly. The article starts out with a fact that is staggering. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, only 13 percent of all employees in the world are engaged at work. I was completely shocked by this low number. With that said, the United States is in the middle of the pack with 30 percent of employees being engaged in at work, but that is still a decent amount lower than half of all workers employed in the country.
Included in the article is a graphic that explains the three types of employees: engaged employees, not-engaged employees and actively disengaged employees.
- Engaged employees are those who work with passion and feel a connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.
- Not-engaged employees are essentially checked out. The are sleepwalking through their workday, putting required time–but not energy or passion– into their work.
- Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy to be there, they are busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.
“Engaged workers stand apart from their not-engaged and actively disengaged counterparts because of the discretionary effort they consistently bring to their roles,” Reilly writes. “These employees willingly go the extra mile, work with passion, and feel a profound connection to their company. They are the people who will drive innovation and move your business forward.”
In her article, Reilly goes on to write that increasing engagement should be a strategic priority for all businesses. “Measuring employee engagement is important,” she writes. “Measuring the right things–those that matter most to performance and provide a framework for positive change–is crucial.” In order to help businesses focus on employee engagement, Gallup completes meta-analysis research that pools multiple studies every four years to keep current.
In 2012, Gallup researchers studied 49,928 work units, which included nearly 1.4 million employees, using 263 research studies across 192 organizations in 49 industries and 34 countries. This latest survey further confirmed the well-established connection between employee engagement and key performance outcomes in the areas of:
- customer ratings
- profitability
- productivity
- turnover (for high-turnover and low-turnover organizations)
- safety incidents
- shrinkage (theft)
- absenteeism
- patient safety incidents
- quality (defects)
Not only does engaging your employees cut back on turnover, it will also help your business thrive. “Gallup researchers studied the differences in performance between engaged and actively disengaged work units and found that those scoring in the top half on employee engagement nearly doubled their odds of success compared with those in the bottom half,” Reilly writes. “Work units in the top quartile in employee engagement outperformed bottom-quartile units by 10 percent on customer ratings, 22 percent in profitability, and 21 percent in productivity. Work units in the top quartile also saw significantly less turnover (25 percent in high-turnover organizations and 65 percent in low-turnover organizations), shrinkage (28 percent), and absenteeism (37 percent) and fewer safety incidents (48 percent), patient safety incidents (41 percent), and quality defects (41 percent).”
According to Reilly, engagement begins with each individual employee and is subjective. “Employees don’t check their personalities at the door when they come to work,” she writes. “Knowing that they are respected as individuals at work can have a significant impact on how employees view their overall lives.” Because each person’s potential extends well beyond his or her job description, managers are tasked with figuring out how to recognize an employee’s unique set of beliefs, talents, goals and life experiences that drive his or her performance, personal success and well being. Every interaction between a manager and an employee has the potential to influence the employees engagement and inspire discretionary effort.
Five strategies to help your dental practice build a constituency of engaged employees include:
- Using the right employee engagement survey. Ask your employees for their opinions and create action to implement them. Don’t pick an arbitrary set of questions off the internet. Design questions that are specifically geared and relevant to your practice–ones that are possible to act on. Data gathered from the questions should be proven to influence key performance metrics.
- Focus on engagement at the local and organizational levels. Real change occurs at the local level, but it happens only when company leaders set the tone from the top. Companies realize the most benefit comes from leaders weaving employee engagement into performance expectations for managers and enable them to execute on those expectations. Managers and employees must feel empowered to make a significant difference in their immediate environment. Leaders and managers should work with employees to identify barriers to engagement and opportunities to effect positive change.
- Select the right managers. The best managers understand that their success and that of the organization relies on employees’ achievements. But not everyone can be a great manager. Great managers care about their people’s success. They seek to understand each person’s strengths and provide employees with every opportunity to use their strengths in their role. Great managers empower their employees, recognize and value their contributions, and actively seek their ideas and opinions. It takes talent to be a great manager, and selecting people who have this talent is important. Whether hiring from outside or promoting from within, businesses that scientifically select managers for the unique talents it takes to effectively manage people greatly increase the odds of engaging their employees. Companies should treat the manager role as unique, with distinct functional demands that require a specific talent set.
- Coach managers and hold them accountable for their employees’ engagement. Gallup’s research has found that managers are primarily responsible for their employees’ engagement levels. Companies should coach managers to take an active role in building engagement plans with their employees, hold managers accountable, track their progress, and ensure that they continuously focus on emotionally engaging their employees. The most successful managers view Gallup’s employee measurement tool as the elements for great managing, not just questions for measuring. By doing so, they gain a powerful framework to guide the creation of a strong, engaged workplace.
- Define engagement goals in realistic, everyday terms. To bring engagement to life, leaders must make engagement goals meaningful to employees’ day-to-day experiences. Describing what success looks like using powerful descriptions and emotive language helps give meaning to goals and builds commitment within a team. Make sure that managers discuss employee engagement at weekly meetings, in action-planning sessions, and in one-on-one meetings with employees to weave engagement into daily interactions and activities and to make it part of the workplace’s DNA.
Even if you think your employees are engaged enough, or you think there is nothing wrong with your practice’s management techniques, I would recommend you read over the five strategies and begin to implement them. The facts are all there. Employee engagement can affect your business at every level, including retaining employees and creating happy, satisfied, return patients. What do you have to lose?
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