There's a lot of talk about employee engagement. But, what does an engaged employee look like? Find out here. By Hannah Price. To me, this is problematic. As I tried to untangle this and disseminate what an engaged employee is—what they do and how they honestly behave—I distilled it down to five key behaviors. Through research and anecdotal experiences, these are the behaviors that I almost always see in fellow engaged employees and are often missing in disengaged employees.
Engaged employees are active participants in their work; they want to be doing it and to get it done. Hence, creating a positive work culture where employees look out for each other. A significant sign of an engaged employee is that they are disciplined in every aspect of their work. They have a proper attitude, respect others, maintain their schedule, and complete their work in the given time frame.
When your employees are disciplined, it becomes easier for a manager to delegate a task without any hassle. They know what is expected of them and how they can help the organization excel in the present market.
Highly engaged employees communicate effectively to make the best use of time. They collaborate with others and provide clear cut information so that there is always a smooth flow of work. Moreover, they listen to others and respect their viewpoint. When there is a clear flow of communication among employees, there are fewer conflicts and increased productivity. It is because every employee understands what their role is and have a clear vision of what they need to do.
Thus, enhancing engagement and boosting morale in the long run. Engaged employees have a clear understanding of what their job requires from them. They acknowledge their strengths and try to work on their weaknesses. These employees are skilled and capable that gives them the confidence to perform exceptionally.
Moreover, they have a positive attitude and approach while starting any project or task. They strategize well and have a firm belief that things will work out in their favor. This allows them to motivate themselves and others as well to attain organizational goals.
Employees that are engaged are always open to collaborating with others. They believe in teamwork and desire to achieve success without any shortcomings. Moreover, collaboration makes it possible for the employees to experiment with new ideas. People from different backgrounds will provide a broader perspective on things that need to unfold.
This further helps them to innovate and develop processes to accomplish their objectives. Employees with high levels of engagement can align their personal and professional goals.
They know how to balance their work without reducing productivity. Their main goal is to achieve all the targets without wasting time. Moreover, aligning their goals lets them see a clear picture of what they want to achieve in the future. When they understand their main objective, they start planning and take steps to accomplish them.
And as a leader, you need to support and guide them. With your mentorship , they will be able to pave the correct path and achieve good satisfaction levels. Employees that are always engaged have the eagerness to learn every day. They make it a habit to learn and relearn new things continuously. On the other hand, they encourage others as well to discover new ways to work. This way, they open up endless opportunities to become proficient in their job.
Moreover, it allows them to gain experience through which they can leverage their skillset. Before you can start to measure their level of engagement ask yourself the following:. When all these components are in place, you can begin to look closer at how well engaged your employees are.
Taking a close look at the business and its leadership first can also help you further develop employee engagement strategies and practices.
The idea of just having satisfied employees may be enough for some managers, but maintaining high levels of employee engagement is important for many reasons. When your employees are engaged, the workplace environment becomes a place of positive attitudes.
When employees are engaged, the office atmosphere improves, their actions are dependable and internal disputes are minimal, if not non-existent. Workers who are engaged feel like part of the team and in turn, work together to help lead your business to successful outcomes.
Several research studies have data that proves employee engagement is more than just liking a job and wanting to do well. These studies provide a more intricate look at why employee engagement is a vital part of your business model. They show the importance of this practice and how its results go beyond just increased productivity. For example:. The numbers are in, and they clearly point to the benefits of implementing engagement practices among employees. The idea behind maintaining or improving the number of engaged employees is based on research and studies that have been created to show just how beneficial it can be.
Before discussing how you can achieve these results, look at some of the benefits. Engaged employees are likely to help increase profit revenues every year. The benefits of engaged employees have a trickle-down effect throughout the entire company.
Those who are showing up with feelings of pride and motivation to work provide a higher quality service to your customers. When customer satisfaction is high, profits tend to rise. In turn, shareholders received a better return on their investments.
Fostering a workplace environment where the employees feel supported and conduct their responsibilities within a team-focused atmosphere is good for the entire company.
A business that has employee engagement strategies tends to have less sick days to account for. Companies with engaged employees can expect to see a reduction in the number of days of work missed by an average of four days per employee per year. Those who come to work every day, do so because they believe in what they are doing. They feel as though they have the backing of the company they are doing it for and want to show up and work hard. They have an emotional commitment to the work, which drives them to help the company reach its goals.
This concept measures engagement through an employee survey that works a lot like a personality assessment in that they both rely on benchmark data to interpret scores.
When the answers are received, they are compared to the benchmark data. Gallup, no stranger to the topic of engagement, finds there are several patterns of behavior unique to highly engaged employees , including:. The natural question, therefore, is why not just teach workers to overcome barriers, focus on strengths, draft a plan and take accountability? Why make engagement part of a manager's job? Managers create the conditions that promote the behaviors of engaged employees or just the opposite with the relationships they establish.
The manager is either an engagement-creating coach or an engagement-destroying boss, but both relationships affect employee behavior. Coaches empower workers to take on challenges and use their strengths, which engages workers.
Engaged workers don't need or want a boss, but they will seek out their manager's advice, assistance and advocacy to improve their performance.
These empowering relationships nurture the behaviors of engagement -- "You help me do this so I can behave like that" -- that enable high performance. The traditional boss, on the other hand, is transactional -- "You give me this, I behave like that" -- which can create learned helplessness, discouraging the discretional effort that engaged employees exhibit, and ultimately disengaged employees who don't own their own engagement.
As a result, they actually teach their employees to need constant managerial intervention because they can't overcome obstacles, plan, take accountability or operate with their strengths on their own. They have to be bossed, because that's the environment their managers have established. Both kinds of relationships require a manager's close involvement, which is why managers have so much influence over engagement.
But the kind of involvement is very different. The difference is especially noticeable in a key way: Coaches individualize, and bosses generalize.
All people have innate qualities that enable them to excel in particular ways. Matching those strengths to task or role can create extraordinary performance outcomes, and employees who work with their strengths tend to be more engaged than others. Generalization blurs those differences. Bosses who generalize will have trouble capitalizing on strengths and may be unable to detect engagement problems. Individualization allows managers to see workers' unique qualities as well as their engagement needs, which are different from worker to worker, day to day.
That perspective helps them help workers articulate their own engagement needs. There's an exceptionally effective tactic for that, which managers can adapt for workplace engagement: the Socratic method.
The Socratic method is a dialectic that poses questions to stimulate reflection and critical thinking. Coaches use the Socratic method -- though most probably don't label it as such -- to help workers think through challenges and solutions, analyze their performance and plan their approach to their work.
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