Employee Engagement Chronicle #7

David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Chronicle is your primary source for current news, views, reviews, and research on employee engagement. Each entry includes a link to an article or post with a short verbatim tidbit from the article. If you are intrigued, click on the author or source name at the start of each summary to study the full article.

The Chronicle beings with the key point for each of the sources listed:

Get The Point:

• Emotional engagement and human bonding energize employees and catalyze productive energies.
• Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work
• Employee engagement is money in the bank
• Have you heard the communication “secrets?”

Engage your employees to reduce attritionis from the Deccan Hearld. this article outlines a number of presentations related to HR and employee engagement. The following section outlining the points of Jyothi Menon really caught me eye: In a scathing indictment of the indifferent ways corporates function today in pursuit of their toplines and bottomlines growth and address the “deadly disease of attrition”, Standard Chartered Bank Vice President — HR Jyothi Menon, in her impassioned presentation on Emotional Engagement at the Workplace maintained that HR is no longer human resource but human relations. Pointing out that corporates, in their efforts to tackle attrition have not been able to connect with their employees, Ms Menon said, it was high time corporates did a reality check and emotionally engaged and bonded with their staff. “Only through emotional engagement and human bonding can organisations energise employees and catalyse their productive energies towards human excellence.”Well said Jyothi.

Engagement vs. Hierarchy – Well-Being in Chinese Workplaces  is in Positive Psychology New Daily. The article discuccses Gallup’s 4 elements of employee engagement – (1) Clarity of expectations and basic materials supported (2) Encourage employee contribution & fulfilment (3) Sense of belonging (4) Intellectual resources. Timothy So concludes the article: As Aristotle said, “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” I wish my friend, as well as every employee, could leave his office with the biggest smile everyday after engaging in his work

Anne Moore Odell  wrote about Engaged Employees Equal Increased Earnings in Social Funds.This is yet another article looking at Towers Perrin engagement work. The difference between what companies need employees to do and what employees want to do has been named by Towers Perrin the “engagement gap.” Only one fifth (21%) of workers in the study are engaged in their work while 38% of polled workers are partly to fully disengaged. In one three year study of 40 global organizations, for example, we found that ‘high employee engagement’ companies enjoyed significantly better financial results on measures such as operating margin, net profit margin, revenue growth and earnings per share growth than ‘low employee engagement’ companies,” said Max Caldwell, Managing Principal of Towers Perrin.

Watson Wyatt Study Reveals Six Communication ‘Secrets’ of Top-Performing Employers. This article outlines the six communication secrets:

1. Focusing managers and other employees on customer needs
2. Engaging employees in running the business
3. Helping managers communicate effectively
4. Leveraging the talents of internal communicators to manage change effectively
5. Measuring the impact of employee communication
6. Branding the employee experience