The ongoing cycle of customer experience success is comprised of four main influencers: Employees, Customers, Management, and Data. In this series, CSP examines the Employee segment of that cycle and the benefits of focusing on internal culture to drive success.
Understanding Employee Engagement
As defined by the Corporate Leadership Council, “Engagement is the extent to which employees commit to something or someone in their organization and how hard they work and how long they stay as a result of that commitment.”
Engagement is all about intentionally creating a motivating workplace environment, while simultaneously aligning individual employee talents with business strategy. Employees engaged in their work are likely to be motivated, to work with passion, to remain committed to their employer, and to stay focused on achieving business goals and driving the organization’s future.
Why It’s Important to Measure Employee Engagement
1 – Employee engagement directly correlates with performance and business results
No business can expect to grow and achieve sustainable success without an engaged workforce. This is especially true as it applies to customer service and satisfaction. Customer experience is nurtured from the inside out, and relies on competent, well-trained, and highly motivated employees. Sure, you may deliver annual performance reviews and objectives, but that’s only scratching the surface of the overall success of your team.
2 – Being a ‘Great Place to Work’ attracts top talent
A company’s reputation as an employer is one factor determining the quality of applicants for open positions, be they external or internal applicants. Being a great place to work is not just about bragging rights and publicity, it demonstrates to potential candidates (not to mention customers and the general public) that you are doing the all the right things to keep your employees feeling fulfilled. Any worthy candidate will see this as extra incentive to join your team. It may even attract them away from competitors with similar openings available.
3 – Engaged employees are emotionally invested
Your contract with your employees goes beyond tangible benefits like compensation and benefits. How employees feel about their jobs – their managers, their workload and hours, the company’s mission and the quality of the product or service – makes the difference between a job that looks good on paper and one that is satisfying in practice. Employees who are emotionally invested in the company’s success are among your greatest assets.
4 – High engagement reduces employee churn
The highest-engaged employees are the least likely to look for or take other employment opportunities that come their way. Naturally, it follows that those who are the least engaged are also the least committed to staying on the team. Not only is it costly to regularly lose employees and have to replace them, voluntary departures affect the morale of the rest of the team.
5 – Engagement can’t be ‘felt,’ it must be measured
While a manager may have a sense of who the most and least engaged members of the team are, many employees will fall somewhere in the invisible middle. These employees are susceptible to being swayed in either direction. Improving individual and overall engagement is only achievable if you know the baseline from which you’re working. Employee engagement metrics take many of the intangible motivators of performance success and make them tangible, visible, and trackable. That’s an essential step for setting goals and implementing internal initiatives to improve engagement.
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