Building a Culture of High Engagement

How many times have you asked yourself how you can build a high degree of discretionary, sustainable performance among your employees? That’s a question that is often easier asked than answered, especially since forcing employee engagement is difficult at best.

Research shows that highly engaged employees contribute significantly higher productivity to customer satisfaction, sales results and retention. The good news is that you don’t have to cajole your employees to get superior performance. There are alternatives - options that can help you foster in them a desire to engage more deeply with your organization, thereby improving overall company performance. With CLG as your partner, you can overcome barriers by helping your managers and leaders adopt new behaviors that promote top level engagement among employees.

The Hard Facts

CLG doesn’t underestimate the challenge; the statistics are daunting. In many organizations, less than a third of employees are fully engaged in their work. A recent study* shows that:

• 29% of people are actively engaged in their jobs
• 54% of people are not engaged in their jobs
• And another 17% are actively disengaged

While it’s true that most employees start a new job with a genuine desire to do well, after six months their engagement levels typically drop off. This happens for a variety of reasons, including poor leadership, job-related stress, lack of recognition, and feelings of being undervalued.

The stakes are significant. In our experience, moving from compliant “have to” performance to fully engaged discretionary “want to” performance yields improvement rates of 30% to 300%.

So, what can you do to avoid these pitfalls and bring out the best in your employees? What key factors will have the most impact in boosting employee commitment?

Key Factors in Employee Engagement

Certain factors clearly contribute to elevated performance among employees. Leaders that successfully engage their people demonstrate distinct skills and practices that separate them from their less effective colleagues. Despite the common belief that these leaders are “born, not made,” the vast majority of leaders can develop the practices that build consistent, high engagement work environments.

CLG’s Performance Catalyst^® Methodology

It’s one thing for a handful of leaders to foster high engagement in their areas, but is quite another matter to build a culture of high engagement across hundreds of leaders. Through implementation of our Performance Catalyst^®, CLG can help your organization identify and develop the leadership behaviors that drive employee engagement. The senior leadership team sets the priorities and direction for the entire Performance Catalyst process by identifying their most important business goals and what is needed to achieve those goals. These leaders put in place a detailed plan to ready all first and second level managers whose work relates to the targeted results. Cascading throughout the organization, managers at all levels become aligned to the strategic goals by fulfilling their own roles in effective leadership.

CLG understands that behavioral changes don’t happen overnight. That’s why our efforts are consistently focused on you and your employees. We are with you every step of the way; observing, and working with you to change the behaviors that hold you back from achieving your objectives.

Learn more about CLG’s Performance Catalyst^® methodology and the Make-It^® Model here.

*“Getting Personal in the Workplace,” Gallup Management Journal, June 10, 2004, ^© 2004 The Gallup Organization