The phrase "employee engagement" sounds a little bit pejorative when literally translated to Czech. The English term is, however, one of the most commonly discussed concepts in human resources today. It describes the situation when employees are actively involved in their work, strongly motivated and enthusiastic. It is the very opposite of burnout and fear of failure based on a corporate culture of accusations.
Various studies and general recommendations show us how bad the situation of a lack of engagement in companies is and what we can do about it. Today we will be a little more specific. We will summarize a few tips by a representative of SABMiller, Laura Temple, on how to drive employee engagement. SABMiller isone of the world's largest producers of beer, including Pilsner Urquell. Laura Temple works as Head of Leadership Engagement at SABMiller. She spoke about employee engagement in a recent interview on the HR Zone website.
"Employee engagement means two things for me –it’s a management philosophy and practice on the one hand and an outcome of that practice and philosophy on the other," explains Laura Temple. "The outcome is tremendous, its when you have employees who are willing to input a high degree of discretionary effort to help the organisation achieve its goals. Then she adds that SABMiller has been using systematic psychometric testing of job applicants since the 1960s in order to identify employees who are more likely to become engaged.
Temple recommends the following steps to companies willing to strengthen the engagement of their employees:
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Learn from your employees what the greatest obstacles are in their path to greater engagement.
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Focus on customer experience. Try to find the correlation between low employee engagement and low customer satisfaction.
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Develop a strategy to increase engagement, but make sure that your managers will be able to realize it.
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Promote the use of modern communication technologies such as blogs and social media to share a common vision and communicate across the organization.
When creating a corporate culture based on employee engagement, Laura Temple mentions one most important things not be missed. That is support from the top. She advises not to start any initiatives unless top management has an awareness or interest in the need to build a culture of engagement. So your first task will be to obtain this support. You will need strong arguments to convince your bosses about the tremendous outcomes you could achieve.
You can read the whole interview here.
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