what affects Employee Engagement?

A review of the research by Ruyle, Eichinger & De Meuse (2009) identified

the following 11 main factors affecting Employee Engagement.
1. Strategic Alignment employees work is in line with where the business is
going and how it is going to get there
2. Trust in Senior Leadership Employees believe in, trust and follow senior
leaders
3. Immediate Manager Working Relationship the quality of the
management team directly impacts the performance and retention of
employees
4. Peer Culture effective peer relationships leads to highly engaged,
productive employees and drives organisation performance
5. Personal Influence employees feel that they can strive to seek better
ways of doing things, to innovate new ideas and that their efforts (be they
successful or not) will be recognised
6. Nature of my Career providing employees with meaningful career paths,
that will inspire and provide them with a variety of opportunities to grow and
develop and lead to their goals
7. Career Support providing employees with the opportunity to develop
through assignments or key jobs
8. Nature of the Job providing employees with jobs that are designed to
challenge them; that are a good fit with employees skills, qualifications,
experience
9. Development Opportunities providing employees not only with formal
learning programmes but also with the opportunity to practice their newly
acquired skills and knowledge on the job under the watchful eye and also the
opportunity to learn from others outside formal learning programmes.
10. Employee Recognition recognising in a sincere and timely manner
employee contributions and incremental improvements
11. Pay Fairness motivate employees by implementing equitable pay linked
to performance and also to the type of the company (e.g. industry leader or
follower)
What One Factor affects Employee Engagement the Most?
Research indicates that the single most important factor to drive employee

engagement and retention is the Immediate Manager Working Relationship.

Good management is critical to the success of retaining and engaging
employees and bad management is often cited as the reasons why
employees leave their job.
Good People Managers are competent in informing employees of what is
required and expected from them, providing feedback on their performance,
providing opportunities for their development, delegating appropriate levels
of responsibility and setting priorities. They are approachable, fair, good
listeners and establish and maintain good relationships with their direct
reports and other key colleagues.

3 Factors That Have the Largest Impact on Employee Engagement

Feb 18, 2014 | Steve Wendel

If employee engagement is so important, as I argued in my last blog post,

what determines whether your employees are actually engaged or not? In
this post, Ill talk about the 3 big factors that shape engagement, and what
you can do broadly to improve it:

The workplace environment in which someone does their job,

The job the person is doing,
The person whos doing the job
Remember that I have defined employee engagement as the emotional
attachment an employee has to their work; that attachment is strongly
related to increased discretionary effort, retention, and presenteeism at work.
(Some authors us the term in confusing and vague ways at times that I
outline in my previous post, on how to make sense of the noise around what
engagement really is). With that, lets get started. In this post well
examine these three factors and see how they can improve employee
engagement.

1. Create a Supportive Workplace

Start with direct supervisors

To a large extent, whether one has an engaging work environment or not is
determined by whom you directly report to and work with on a daily basis.
Gallups CEO Jim Clifton states that the single biggest decision you make in
your jobis who you name manager. When you name the wrong person
manager, nothing fixes that bad decision. Not compensation, not benefits
nothing.1 Les McKeown, author and CEO of Predictable Success, puts it
more event more bluntly: The problem is with your managers, not your
employees. If your employees are disengaged, your managers are at fault.2

Characteristics of a supportive environment

What is it is that supervisors do to build engagement? In their review of the
data on engagement, the UKs Institute for Employment Studies found that
the key driver of engagement is the sense of feeling valued and involved
with ones work.3 The sense of feeling valued comes from:

Involvement in decision-making
The ability to voice ideas, and be listened to
Opportunities for growth
The feeling that the organization is concerned for their employees wellbeing
The employees manager has a primary role in each of these areas, as does
the leadership and HR team of the company. Author Paul Marciano posits
that improving engagement means that company leaders need to promote a
culture of RESPECT in the workplace, where RESPECT is his acronym for the
five key elements: Recognition, Empowerment, Supportive Feedback,
Partnering, Expectations Consideration and Trust.4 While other researchers
use different terms, these are common themes. For example, Gallup argues
that to improve engagement, hire, promote, or train managers who genuinely
care for their people, invest in talent, and creatively motivate employees
towards clear metrics.5

2. Create Supportive Jobs

The job itself must be meaningful and interesting
Beyond creating an environment in which people feel valued, certain core

characteristics of peoples jobs drive engagement. First and foremost:

employees must feel that the job itself is meaningful to the organization, and
contributes to the goals of the organization.6 Researchers have identified a
host of other job characteristics that contribute to engagement.7 The work
itself should:

Be interesting and challenging,

Have variety,
Allow the use of different skills,
Allow personal discretion (autonomy)
There is a vast body of research behind various job characteristics; in 1976,
Locke noted that at least 3600 studies had been conducted as of that point in
time on the influence of job characteristics on employee performance and
topics related to engagement.8 However these characteristics are some of
the most common results in the literature.

Because engagement is driven in part by the nature of the work itself, some
roles appear to be inherently more engaging than others. Managers are
generally more engaged than non-managers, for example. That may be
because managers can clearly see their purpose within the organization and
usually have more autonomy than other employees. There are also
significant differences occur across industries. An astounding 28% of
transportation workers and 26% of manufacturing workers considered
actively disengaged (spreading dissent), but only 9% of physicians.9

What must not occur

Variety, discretion and opportunities for growth are irrelevant if an employee
feels the jobsite is unsafe or is harassed at work and feels that the employer
is indifferent to their situation. A lack of organizational or supervisor support
in face of harassment can destroy engagement, as can these negative
factors:

Perceived injustice in how one is treated by supervisors

Job site accidents and injury

Inability to perform ones job (lack of skills or resources)

Satisfaction and engagement can be increased by ensuring that job sites are
safe and comfortable, does not overly fatigue the body. Ensure that job sites
are safe and comfortable to safeguard satisfaction and engagement. Again, if
employees are in danger, or dont have what they need to do their job well,
other efforts to improve engagement are merely window dressing.

3. Changing the Jobs People Fulfill

Engagement author Paul Marciano also notes that in a highly disengaged
workforce, resolution may require changes in staffing. While changing in
staffing may seem extreme, its important to note that engagement is, in
large part, determined by relatively fixed characteristics individual and the
job. Some researchers argue that dissatisfaction can arise from the inherent
mismatch between what the job offers the individual versus what they want,
and others that peoples personalities differ in terms of how satisfied they will
be at work overall.10 In either case, efforts to change engagement without
fundamentally changing the individual or the role can only go so far. Thus,
high engagement starts with the right people in the right jobs for them.