Happy and engaged employees engage with clients. Those clients will in turn engage with the organisation concerned and make it more successful. That was the message from Paul Drew, CEO of DPG, when he spoke at The Future of Employee Engagement, an event sponsored by DPG and employee engagement specialist and self-confessed happiness experts Perkbox.
Drew’s assertion that employee engagement is critical to business success was echoed by Gautam Sahgal, chief operating officer at Perkbox. He said that in order to boost engagement, organisations needed to boost employee happiness as happy teams do amazing things. This has to be a business priority. Why? Because half of the UK’s 28 million employees are either not engaged or are actively disengaged with their work.
At the event, held in London, attendees heard from two speakers on the future of employee engagement.
One of those speakers was psychologist Jodi O’Dell. She said employee engagement decreased absenteeism, turnover and accidents at work and increased customer service, productivity, sales and profits.
O’Dell cited the work of leadership and engagement specialist Kevin Kruse, which shows a strong correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. There is what she called an engagement profit chain for organisations. Engaged employees lead to better service, which leads to increased customer satisfaction. This leads to more sales, more profit and greater shareholder return. It all links back to Drew’s message at the beginning of this post.
So what’s the magic formula for engaging employees? According to O’Dell, there needs to be a mix of extrinsic motivators – such as financial reward - and intrinsic motivators, such as individuals wanting to do a good job and developing their knowledge and skills.
She said there were three motivational drivers for engagement on the intrinsic front. These are:
Historically, organisations have focused on external factors to drive engagement, such as reward. But, in order to build sustainable, long-term engagement, employers need to look at developing emotional commitment. By doing this, staff are more likely to go the extra mile for customers.
“Employers want the workforce to really go the extra mile, to put in discretionary effort,” said O’Dell. “That's where they're going to really pull all the stops out for the customer on the shop floor. To do this we have to start looking at emotional commitment. How do we get that discretion effort from people? That's where we'll get sustainability. We need to take a more holistic view of what engagement is.”
The second speaker, Perry Timms, founder and chief energy officer at PTHR, said organisations needed to stop conducting staff surveys in their current format. “I look forward to the day when organisations are people powered and engagement surveys are in the bin,” he told attendees. Timms sketched out a new vision for employee engagement. This vision encompassed workplaces where employers provide meaningful work, a positive work environment, opportunities for individuals to grow and leaders that employees can trust.
In this new world, organisations will measure different types of employee data, such us what employees are enjoying, what they are not enjoying and where they are spending their time.
“Event-based surveys will be replaced by collecting data on what matters to colleagues, what difference they feel they make and how we can use that data to reward them and channel their energy and create opportunities,” he said.
For HR, he said this meant bringing in new skills: people with data analytics skills, technologists to create engagement platforms and behavioural scientists who understand where people's motivations lie. This vision for engagement based on emotional commitment is at the heart of Perkbox’s future product development. Its platform is based on three areas of wellbeing: financial, emotional and physical wellbeing
Sahgal said that by focusing on these three elements, employers would have a more engaged workforce.
What employers must remember is that intrinsic motivators, such as learning, are more important than extrinsic motivators such as pay. This was a point echoed by Timms.
“The future of engagement is about matching your purpose as an organisation to the purpose of employees. This is the sweet spot for organisations.”
If you are interested in learning more about how Perkbox can help you make your employees happier and more engaged - click this link here
Watch the below video of the event and watch out for the next one coming soon.
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