Employee engagement definition

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Employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has to the organization and its goals.

Kruse, pg. 8

As an employee, feeling engaged at work is a better way to live. It’s wonderful to have open, two-way communication with your leaders, to have opportunities to grow and learn, to receive recognition for work well done, and to trust your leaders and know they trust you. One might say that every employee longs for engagement. But why does an employer care about engagement?

The profit bottom-line reason for engagement is the productivity of the company’s employees. Where an employee with low engagement may accomplish the work that’s expected of her, an engaged employee will go out of her way to serve her customers and do excellent work. A disengaged employee fluctuated with the time of day and week. On a Friday afternoon, the disengaged employee’s mind is on the weekend to come, and the same could be said an hour before work ends any day of the week. An engaged employee; however, continues to put her best effort in, even late on a Friday. There is intrinsic motivation to achieve the company’s goals, not simply because that’s necessary to collect a paycheck, but because the employee herself believes the goal is worthwhile.

The impact an engaged workforce has is difficult to measure in a company because engagement affects every aspect of the company’s output. Engagement shows up, not only in the quantity of the employee’s efforts but the quality of their work. An engaged workforce has fewer mistakes, more satisfied customers, less turnover, and greater resilience than an unengaged workforce. All this is important to a company that values the profit bottom-line alone, but a company with social, environmental, or biblical bottom-lines will also find these factors important. Engaged employees will take the extra effort to create products that are not only successful but socially and environmentally conscious. They will do this, not because their manager micromanaged their work, but because they were passionate about these goals themselves. Employees who are engaged with a biblical bottom-line will reflect on the efforts to integrate faith into their work and work with their leaders to find new ways to accomplish this.

Kruze highlights the profitable nature of an engaged workforce, but the advantages go beyond profit. Clear organizational goals is a foundation he builds the entirety of his engagement theory on, even though only the first of the four drivers, growth, directly touches on goals (and those are personal goals). While Kruze maintains profit as an underlying reason for engagement, perhaps because he thinks that’s what CEOs want to hear, I am not convinced this is the strongest argument for engagement. Like the one-minute manager who sees people and profit as two sides of the same coin, I want to see engagement as a way to bring people to life rather than to get them to do more work for me. There are many engaged people at my workplace who regularly go beyond what’s required of them to deliver excellent service, but I’m not always sure that their engagement is truly in their best interest. My application is to consider what it would look like to be fully committed to my organization’s goals and to play out the result of that commitment over a twenty year period ((Blanchard)).

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