Talent Strategy Employee Engagement:

"Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them."

David Sirota, Founder, Mercer-Sirota and Co-author The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want (Wharton School Publishing, 2005) for HBR, Jan’05

Employee engagement benefits business performance. It’s no surprise then that employee engagement best practices are CEOs’ top priorities. 

The future of work  is constantly evolving and with the advent of new technology, many organizations are finding that the ‘employment deal’ is undergoing a transformation. You need to pivot your engagement metrics into meaningful insights to drive positive change. Proper analysis and execution, along with understanding what your people really want, are the real keys to an engaged workforce.

What is Employee Engagement?

Through careful consideration and planning, you can achieve a company culture of engagement. Having an engaged workforce reduces turnover, which will save you thousands of dollars. Your people will bring passion to their tasks, raising the quality of output. Cultivating and empowering future leaders is an investment in your organization.

Engaged employees are proud, motivated to go above and beyond, committed to staying with the organization, and willing to advocate for your company.

The vast majority of people join an organization eager to do their best and open to their employer’s needs. But very few organizations are able to maintain that level of enthusiasm, even after six months. Why? The fact is that in many organizations, management demotivates workers.

Engagement requires a holistic understanding of the organizational dynamic.  Succeeding in an ever changing environment requires that organizations do the following:

• Architect a strategic plan that establishes clear goals, structures, and accountabilities that drive performance
• Enable employees to execute on strategy through flexible and participative systems, process, tools, and resources
• Unlock workforce potential and sustain employee enthusiasm by ensuring leaders and managers meet the achievement, camaraderie, and equity needs of their people
• Elevate leadership and management practices by ensuring leaders and managers live the values and model the behaviors that promote a partnership driven culture

Assessments must be carefully constructed to enable real action. Sirota maintains a continually updated and robust normative database of client survey data from some of the world’s top brands. Well over one million survey responses from employees in over 100 countries on all continents are added to our database each year. Our normative dataset currently includes over 500 organizations, grouped into 10 industrial sectors and we have the capability to customize the comparison based on many other demographics such as: Occupation, Management/Non-Management, Union/Non-Union, Gender, Ethnicity, and Tenure.

Employee Engagement Strategies for Productivity

Specialists in organizational research since 1972, Mercer | Sirota has advisory capabilities and technologies that span all aspects of the employee experience, including team effectiveness, leadership and culture. Combined with advanced analytics and data mining tools, Mercer | Sirota’s surveys help clients get real-time insight from engagement data. Mercer | Sirota then identifies where leaders, employees, strategy and culture are misaligned, uncovering hidden factors that drive performance and support positive change. Learn more about Mercer | Sirota’s approach to employee engagement.

Employee Engagement Model

Mercer’s model for effective employee engagement includes giving employees the opportunity to preform and recognizing them for it, cultivating positive relationships and being treated fairly. , We sum this up into three aspects employees seek--achievement, camaraderie and equity—that comprise the Three Factor Model.

For organizations seeking to create an engaging work environment, you need a survey solution grounded in organizational psychology techniques that is designed to unlock the full potential of your people. Learn more about how we can help you build your workforce for the future.