Introduction
Employee engagement is not at its best these days. Due to phenomena like quiet quitting, engagement for those 35 or younger has plummeted. Experts estimate a drop of 6% in just the past three years.
It’s pretty easy to see how poor engagement can be detrimental to your business. People might have limited enthusiasm, care little about their work, and do only the bare minimum. Productivity and profits suffer commensurately.
But business engagement can be a vague term that everyone uses differently. And more to the point, what is the purpose of engagement in the workplace?
We are here to answer that question and more. Read on as we discuss what drives employee engagement and why it matters.
Employee Engagement Meaning
Put simply, employee engagement is all about how employees relate to their job. An engaged employee feels a strong sense of purpose and motivation when they go to work. They can see how their efforts are helping the business to thrive and feel a sense of responsibility for its success.
Engaged employees don’t need additional motivation to go the extra mile. They roll up their sleeves and do what needs doing. You can tell who they are because they’re the go-getters who show up early each day.
In fact, you can measure employee engagement. It becomes most apparent in the end result of an employee’s work.
Their job satisfaction, average productivity, and leadership performance are just a few factors. Engaged employees excel in all categories–and improve where they are lacking.
Conversely, an employee that is not engaged feels a disconnect. They are just trying to punch in their hours, regardless of their quality of work. They don’t feel a strong duty towards the organization or their fellow coworkers.
That’s all good and well, but what are the tangible benefits to an organization with engaged employees? After all, what matters most is that the work gets done.
It may seem at first glance that people don’t need to have passion for their jobs. As long as they are content with their position and pay, nothing else matters. But we are here to show you that engagement has a larger purpose in the grand scheme of things.
What Is the Purpose of Engagement?
Employee engagement is more than just an HR buzzword that you plaster on posters. Having it produces real, measurable effects on your business. Let’s discuss what is the purpose of engagement in your workplace.
1. Increases Productivity
Over the last few years, the percentage of people who are actively engaged while at work has dropped. It’s gone from 36% in 2020 to 34% in 2021 to just 32% in 2022.
This has, unfortunately, led to a rapid decline in employee productivity at many companies. When employees aren’t as engaged as they should be and are only doing the minimum, they aren’t going to be able to produce as they should.
If you find yourself wondering, “What is the importance of employee engagement?”, this reason should always land at the top of the list. The more engaged your employees are day in and day out, the more productive they’re going to be while they’re at work.
2. Improves Collaboration
When people are doing just enough at work not to get fired by their bosses, they typically tend to keep to themselves. Even if they’re having a problem with something, they won’t always bring it up to others because, quite frankly, that will take too much effort on their part.
But when people are engaged in their workplaces, they’re going to be more likely to want to collaborate with others. When they’re having a problem with something, they’ll call a meeting and try to come up with a collaborative solution to it.
Most businesses revolve around collaboration, which is another reason why you’re going to want to make sure your employees are as engaged at work as they can be. Employee engagement is inevitably going to lead to improved collaboration and better results overall.
3. Achieves Goals
In order for your company to succeed, you’re going to need to get into the habit of setting business goals. You should have a set of yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and even daily goals.
You should also aim to have your employees set goals for themselves and strive to achieve them. It’ll increase their employee motivation and make it possible for them to see the progress they’re making as individuals.
By setting goals on both a company-wide and individual level, you can keep everyone who works for you engaged. You can also increase the chances of all these goals being met at some point.
4. Eliminates Stress
As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, you’re going to have some selfish intentions for wanting your employees to be more engaged at work. Employee engagement is going to play a large part in your company’s success.
But you should also try to improve employee engagement for the sake of your employees themselves. This should be part of the corporate wellness program that you put together.
More than 80%Â of U.S. workers report feeling stressed out because of their jobs to some degree. You can help your employees deal with and even eliminate much of their stress by keeping them engaged at work.
Most people are still going to feel at least some stress at work, no matter how engaged they might be. But when people are engaged, they’re often less stressed than they would be otherwise.
Also Read: Top 10 Causes of Stress at Work
5. Decreases Burnout
You might not think that you would have to worry about disengaged employees at your company feeling burned out. But some of your employees might begin to feel burned out at work when they aren’t as engaged as they should be simply because they don’t get the sense that what they’re doing at work matters.
You have the opportunity to turn things around for them by showing them that their work does matter. Something like an employee engagement platform can work wonders for the mental well-being of the people who work for your company.
Even though some of your employees might start to work harder than they were before, it could decrease the burnout they were feeling. They’ll get the sense that they’re making an actual difference within your company, and that could lead to a spike in their employee engagement levels.
Read More: Employee Burnout Signs and Solutions
6. Lowers Absenteeism
When you have employees who are genuinely sick, you should encourage them to stay home. You should also encourage employees to stay home when they feel like they could use mental health days to get their heads together.
But otherwise, you’re going to want to have as many employees in your offices as you can each and every day. Unfortunately, this might not be possible when you have low employee engagement.
When your employees aren’t engaged, they’re going to begin to call out of work for the littlest things. They might even make up excuses just to get out of having to come to work for a day or two.
When you’re able to keep your employees engaged, they’ll be less likely to want to call out of work unnecessarily. They’ll feel a pull to come to work because they won’t want to miss any of the exciting things that you have going on.
7. Reduces Turnover
Are you always having employees leave your company and having to hire replacements for them? This can be very time-consuming and could be costing your company a pretty penny each year.
You should take a step back and ask why so many of your employees are leaving. If you get the sense it could be because they’re not engaged enough at work, turning the engagement dial up a few notches could reverse this trend.
You’ll find that employees will want to stay with your company for longer stretches of time when they’re engaged and enjoy what they do. You won’t need to worry about turnover taking such a big toll on your company anymore.
8. Establishes Loyalty
People might not ever be as loyal to the companies that they work for as they used to be. The days of people staying with the same companies for 40 or 50 years seem like they might be over.
But when you provide people with a fun place to work that keeps them engaged, they’re going to have at least some loyalty to your company. They’ll be more likely to stick around for a longer time at your company, and they’ll also be more than happy to give your company glowing recommendations when people ask about working at it.
9. Enables Recruitment
If your employees aren’t engaged when they’re at work and people outside your company find out about it, how do you think it’s going to reflect on you? As you might guess, people aren’t exactly going to be banging down your company’s doors looking for jobs.
But if people are always hearing about what a great company culture you have and how engaged your employees are, what do you think that might do for your company? It should make recruiting the best employees possible a breeze. You won’t have any trouble getting talented people to come and work for your company.
10. Encourages Optimism
You want the future of your company to look as bright as it possibly can. But it’s going to be difficult for you or anyone else to have much optimism when employee engagement is down dramatically among your staff.
Even if the future of your company might be in a little bit of doubt, keeping your employees engaged will make everyone feel like things are looking up. They’ll be so much more motivated to do a great job and to play their small part in helping your company to succeed. It’s just one more reason why employee engagement is so important.
11. It Creates a Better Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is a tricky problem to solve, both for businesses and individuals. Businesses struggle to find the right scheduling requirements and workload for employees. Employees struggle to balance their personal life outside their work endeavors.
One of the big contributing factors to poor work-life balance is a lack of engagement. Employees feel like they spend too much time at work, little of which is meaningful. They see their job as a drain on their happiness and free time.
In their off-hours, they are trying to recover from work. They bury themselves in entertaining distractions to forget the job they hate. This makes it almost impossible for them to balance work with their personal life.
Engaged employees don’t struggle to find the right balance. Part of this is because they have internalized their work as part of who they are. The boundary between work and personal time is less defined.
This makes it easier for them to devote more time to work or personal life as the need arises. They can shift from one to the other with ease. They no longer sacrifice their sleep for more free time nor take long restroom breaks to shirk their work duties.
Also Read: Your Ultimate Guide to Work-Life Balance
12. It creates trust and buy-in with company leadership
Trust is earned, and that remains true in the workplace. People will not stand behind a leader they do not feel has earned their trust. They may accept marching orders, but deep down, there is a divide between them.
As you can imagine, this does not create a fluid working environment. Instead, it forms an invisible wall between employees and upper management. This wall only grows when employees lack engagement.
Employees who are not engaged tend not to feel much toward their leaders. They are just there to collect a paycheck, nothing more. They have less desire to cooperate and obey leadership.
Engaged employees are more likely to keep to the chain of command. They will trust those who oversee them and give deference where necessary. Overall, this creates a more effective bureaucracy–orders come down, and they obey with alacrity.
13. It Improves Company Culture
Everyone wants to work in a company that feels like Google or Apple. They want to be excited to come into work and mingle with coworkers in a laidback office environment. They hope for a space that accommodates employees with amenities, activities, and even competitions.
However, good company culture is much more than pizza parties and free movie tickets. It’s about how employees thrive on the work floor. Good work culture is the one unique thing that separates your company from all the others.
Company culture is not something you can buy. It’s something that occurs organically over the passage of time. Most of all, it is a creation of both leaders and the people they hire.
Engagement leads to stronger company culture, period. Engaged workers find ways to make the workplace better. They create a stronger balance between work and play.
A notable company culture is one that new hires will hear about in the news. It makes positions at your company quite competitive. You may get much higher-quality candidates if you give the impression of a fun workplace.
Final Thoughts
What is the purpose of engagement in your workplace? It’s hard to choose just one thing since employee engagement affects everything from productivity to company culture. Engaged employees aren’t just more profitable for your organization, they are happier, healthier, and have a strong work-life balance.
Woliba has the employee engagement platform you need to kickstart a more engaged workplace. Request a demo of our industry-leading solutions and see the magic for yourself.
