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24 Nov 2015
by David Walker

Defining employee engagement

Engagement is a topic that is talked about possibly more than anything else in our world of HR and benefits. Yet, it is defined by different people in different ways.

I decided to do a Google search for employee engagement. The definition that came top of the search is the one from Engage For Success:

Employee engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation's goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.

This to me is possibly the least helpful definition for an employee. So Id like to extend a challenge to reward and benefits Directors and Managers across the UK in order to bring employee engagement alive.

My challenge is: Can you define employee engagement in as few words as possible?

Id like to know what it means to you and your organisation. [Spoiler alert: my answer is three quarters of the way down this column].

Engaged individuals

This is a challenge for HR directors or reward professionals to take to their senior team or management layer. As part of your briefings, ask managers what engagement means to them. Because if you ask, you will start to get a sense of where your company is.

If your colleagues understand engagement and they are talking culturally about it then youre well on the way. But you may find that there isnt a clear understanding of what engagement means to an individual or your company. And that is when the challenge really starts: how are you going to define engagement for your organisation?

I think there is a real opportunity to bring engagement alive for employees by making things simple, clear and easy to understand.

With hapi, what we are trying to do is take a platform approach. Lots of companies are taking the platform approach but what makes us different is that ours is as simple and easy to understand as possible.

My answer to the above definition challenge is that I think you can describe employee engagement in three words: unlocking discretionary effort.

Unlocking is all about the tools, the products, the skills. It is the company infrastructure that allows employees to go above their discretionary level. We all get paid for a job, but how do you get people to go over and above that?

Effort is really what it is all about. Through greater effort we get greater output. Through greater output we get greater productivity. And through greater productivity we start to increase the potential of GB plc.

Those three words (unlocking discretionary effort) are the ones Personal Group are focusing on. Any products and services we are developing are going to help our goal of unlocking discretionary effort by the employees of our clients.

Tweet your 3 words describing employee engagement to @personalgroup and lets see if we can identify any trends!

This article was provided by Personal Group

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