The Essential Guide to Employee Engagement: Better Business Performance through Staff Satisfaction

by Sarah Cook

The Essential Guide to Employee Engagement explores the concept and practice behind creating an engaged workforce and how this can contribute to organizational success. Recognizing that engaged employees are more productive, engender greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, and can help to promote your company's brand, the book gives you the necessary tools to make this happen. The author draws on a wide range of international case studies and examples, which demonstrate how an actively-engaged workforce can help your organization to flourish. You are shown how to measure the level of your employees' engagement and provided with a strategy to apply to help increase active staff participation.

Genres: Business

240 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2008

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Cook offers in this volume can help any company (regardless of size or nature) to achieve “better business performance through staff satisfaction,” especially now when the dynamics of employment require an empowerment of workers in ways and to an extent that are unprecedented. Years ago when discussing Southwest Airlines’ competitive advantage, then CEO Herb Kelleher said that it was its people, suggesting, “If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers, and your customers will take care of your shareholders.” The same attitude prevails at other companies, notably Container Store, Nordstrom, and Ritz-Carlton. It is worth noting that these companies also retain their most valuable employees and many of their job applicants now work for competitors.

Some of Cook’s most interesting and valuable material is provided in Chapters 3 and 4 as she explains how to identify “the key drivers of engagement in your business” and then develop a strategy that accommodates them. In Chapter 8, she examines three levels of involvement at which a sense of involvement must occur: with the direct line manager (i.e. supervisor), with associates (individuals as well as teams), and with the organization as a whole. Over the past 50 years, hundreds of surveys have been conducted among millions of workers who were asked to rank that is most important to them. Only one was always ranked first, second, or third: feeling appreciated. (For what it’s worth, compensation was ranked somewhere in the 9-14 range, depending on the given survey.) Cook fully understands how important feeling appreciated is to employees, including line managers. That is why she devotes so much attention to issues that concern recognition and reward, communication, personal accountability, teamwork, and leadership development. Re the latter, all organizations need leadership at all levels and in all areas of operation and such leadership is not based on title or seniority, it is based on taking initiative to do what must be done. When discussing “agents for change” in Chapter 9, she makes a number of excellent recommendations but none of them will be implemented unless and until those involved (a) feel appreciated, (b) understand what needs to be done, (c) agree on the importance of doing it well, and (d) help to decide what must be done. Without shared ownership of a task, an employee will be involved but not engaged in completing it.