How employee engagement will improve performance and productivity

By Craig Burton, Managing Director at The Works Recruitment & Michael Millward, founder of Work Place Learning Centre.

Do you find yourself frustrated by wasted potential, a lack of enthusiasm, or lower than expected productivity from your colleagues or employees? It’s easy to blame staff, but ultimately as business owners and managers, it’s our responsibility as leaders to better engage our employees and to keep them motivated.

We all know that employee engagement is something that business owners and managers get excited about. This is because engaged employees enjoy coming to work, are motivated, have lower sickness absence, use resources more efficiently and are more likely to go the extra mile. But when was the last time you checked to see if your employees were happy at work?

A UK study last year revealed that 61% of workers would choose happiness at work over a high salary so it’s something we should be focusing on. Engagement is a vital factor for a productive workforce so we need to be making sure our employees are feeling valued and appreciated. But building a workforce who are engaged with their work, their managers and their employer isn’t easy.

After successfully placing thousands of people in both temporary and permanent jobs, we know that people who display the traits of being engaged in their roles are most likely to be working hard in productive, successful organisations. This productivity and success provides the basic physiological and safety requirements of Maslow’s hierarchy of motivational needs.

Engaged employees display a sense of belonging that comes from being valued by their employer. In fact, they talk and act like completely engaged employees, who have found a job that suits them. But it all starts with being shown how to be productive and part of something successful.

Could it be that if you focus on helping people to be productive in their jobs that you are more likely to create an engaged and happy employee?

It’s an idea that Christine Brotherton, Head of People and Capability at Perpetual Guardian (a financial services company in New Zealand) has decided to put to the test. In September 2018, she introduced a four-day working week with the aim of improving employee work life balance whilst maintaining a high-quality customer experience and increasing productivity.

This four-day-working-week initiative was not led from the top, although managers did have to demonstrate a commitment to it that motivated employees to get involved. Once that was done it was important that managers took a back seat, and empowered employees to both take the lead and define how it would be assessed.

Employees were challenged to look at their output, their value to the business and the effectiveness of how their jobs were designed, which led to a business process improvement project as well. The results of this project could provide the UK with a game-changing approach to both employee engagement and employee productivity that might be key to building post Brexit sustainable growth.

Employee productivity has to be a priority for Yorkshire businesses in 2019 and before this can be achieved, we as business owners and managers need to adapt the way we work. For too long we have been managing the results and performance but we should be focusing more on attendance. Many workers want flexible working and have other responsibilities outside of work such as family commitments. Have you considered, or would you consider, a 4 day working week for your business?

We are in the process of collecting more data and findings on the New Zealand study and more information will shortly be available if people are interested. Just drop an email to helen.lambert@theworksrec.co.uk if you are.