Getting Employee Engagement Back on Course

Many organizations were successful in navigating through the changing economy in 2009and more were not. If you are unsure about how your organization did, you may want to ask the following questions to diagnose the success of your navigation. Have you revised your organizational strategy and mission as a result of the changing economy? How would you describe the current culture in your organization? Did your company value the employees who you had to lay-off? Was the HR budget cut significantly? Do you still have a training and development strategy?

The 2009 Gallup Employee Engagement Index reported that only 33 percent of workers are engaged in their jobs, 49 percent are not engaged, and 18 percent are actively disengaged. In other words, 67 percent of our workforce are not engaged or actively disengaged. I don’t know about you, but that is a major concern for our employees and organizations today as we compete in the global economy. What happened to valuing our human capital or better said our people that we lead? How about our bottom-line? Gallup researchers, who base the Employee Engagement Index on a survey of nearly 42,000 randomly selected employees, estimate that disengaged workers cost U.S. businesses as much as $350 billion a year.

If your organization did not navigate successfully through the changing economy of 2009, here are some suggestions for getting back on course in 2010:

1. Send out a short survey to your employees to measure employee engagement. Be sure to include both quantitative and qualitative items for measurement. Simply use Survey Monkey or Zoomerang to administer the survey.

2. Align employee goals to the overall organizational strategy. Make sure they are SMART goals.

3. Communicate your mission so all employees know their purpose. The more the mission is communicated, the more likely everyone knows how they contribute to the organization on a daily basis.

4. Ensure that HR is strategic and has a seat at the table.

5. Encourage leaders to manage change and communicate their vision to employees. It is a changing global economy and employees need to know what changes are coming. If your organization isn’t changing and adapting that should be a concern.

6. Provide training and development opportunities. Employees report being more engaged when their organization invests in them. You can invest in your employees by providing on-the-job training, classroom and online learning, mentoring, lunch and learns, and a plethora of other opportunities.

7. Manage performance by setting individual employee SMART goals and providing ongoing coaching and feedback throughout the year. You will also want to document, adjust and communicate performance. There should never be any performance surprises during the mid-year or year-end evaluation. Another key to managing performance is to give employees new job assignments that keep them engaged and empower them to succeed as they learn new skills.

8. Celebrate all of your wins!