In these days requirements towards the employer are high. Employees seek
jobs where they can learn and grow professionally. Relationships between
the employer and employee have been changing from a long-term and loyalty
based relationship to a short term and more benefit seeking relationship.

The reasons for this change can be found from changes in the nature of
work: knowledge based work is increasing and the business environment is
changing fast. To be able to respond to business environment changes,
companies want to keep their human resources flexible.

Due to the nature of knowledge based work, the most important success
factors in a company are the employees.  The employee’s engagement to work
has become hugely important in order to reach high performance levels.
Imagine yourself: How much effort would you be ready to put in for
uninspiring work? Or would you work at full if you would not trust the
strategic decisions of the management? And how about if you can’t
appreciate the company, would you feel a little itch to perform poorly on
purpose.

Employees engaged either to their work, or to the employer, are motivated
to give their best performance and to work for the organization’s goals.
Company’s performance is dependent on the performance of individual
employees. Companies with high levels of engagement outperform their
competitors. Despite all these facts the surveys show that typically only
14% of all employees are highly engaged to their work. These people focus
on getting the job done, they feel part of the team and organization, they
feel sharp and they have less pressure to seek for alternative jobs. These
people are willing to do great work and to help the company to achieve its
strategic goals with their input. It could be said that as a resource of
the organization, these people are working with full capacity. But what
about the remaining 86% of employees?



Disengaged employees are not committed to achieve the goals of company.
The innovativeness and willingness to develop performance is low. These
people are not working with their full capacity and they might even hinder
the company from moving towards its strategic goals. Disengaged people
have lots of wasted capacity and they also lower the total performance of
the company by affecting negatively on the atmosphere in company.

The financial crisis has, unfortunately, made it even more difficult for
employees to trust their employers. Employees often seek continuity and
appreciation and in current economical situation companies often fail to
deliver it to them. Hence the engagement of employees is hard to gain. And
this is why it is now more essential than ever to work for better employee
engagement. Human resource management is still on a quite basic level in
many companies. When the value of employees is understood, it should also
be understood that taking care of this valuable resource is a priority.

Companies have a large scale of options to make employees more engaged.
The most important thing is to have engaging leaders and an engaging
organization culture. Training and coaching can help leaders become better
at engagement.

Questions for you:
How engaged are you yourself?
What would make you more engaged?
Would the same thing that can increase your engagement also work with your
team members?


More about coaching in the next PPA's blog post.