Did you know that highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability?
Low engagement in the workplace can kill not only a company’s profits, but customer satisfaction, safety, output, employee turnover, and much more. Engagement and motivation in the workplace are essential to a strong work culture and a successful organization carried by strong, passionate, and dedicated team members.
Engaged and motivated employees experience benefits beyond personal satisfaction - their company improves, their team prospers, and their careers grow.
Why Employee Engagement Matters
According to the CDC Workplace Health Resource Center, employees are adequately engaged when three psychological needs are met: feeling valued and appreciated (feelings of meaningfulness), psychological safety, and availability (having mental and physical resources to engage at work).
When these needs are met, employees’ work experiences are unmatched. Team members experience less burnout, higher productivity, higher job and life satisfaction, better mental well-being, and a greater sense of belonging. When consistently engaged at work, employees also grow professionally and personally, which fuels a continuous sense of achievement and improvement.
The power of engagement reaches beyond employees as it serves as confirmation and presents learning opportunities for leaders and managers. Low engagement is often caused by a lack of communication or miscommunication between management and employees, or poor communication throughout the entire team. A leader of a highly engaged team is affirmed knowing that they are recognizing employees, rewarding outstanding team members, and communicating praise, expectations, and feedback. Employees who trust leadership and have healthy, respectful relationships with leadership are more engaged than those who have a weak and reluctant relationship with leaders.
Managers and leaders can suffer and grow insecure in their positions at work when their team members are disengaged and communication fails. Poor relationships can create a pattern that fails employees and disgruntled leaders - keeping an open line of communication and recognizing employees and their successes is imperative to a successful organization and happy, productive team members.
Engaged employees not only enjoy benefits and validate leaders, but they also have the power to take an organization to new heights.
Employees who are engaged have a strong understanding of the company’s mission and work hard to bring it to fruition via their daily tasks. Prideful employees are born from engaged ones, who boost morale, decrease turnover, and vitalize the reputation of their organization. Customer satisfaction is also boosted by engaged employees, as when employee ratings go up by 1 point, customer satisfaction increases by 1.3 points.
Teams that are engaged work harder and with more purpose, which leads to a safer workplace, retained talent, higher productivity, and less absenteeism. The evidence that engaged employees boost company success is almost endless - they are the equation for lasting growth and continued positive outcomes.
What causes low engagement?
Pinpointing the cause of low engagement in the workplace can be difficult, as the issue can stem from almost anywhere. However, listed below are some common causes employees experience, including some previously discussed.
Consider thinking about the following points in terms of your place of work to determine if they are possible causes for low engagement:
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Lack of communication and recognition by managers
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Inadequate training/development
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Limited understanding of the company’s mission or goals
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Broken lines of communication or a culture of minimal communication
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Lack of autonomy
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Lack of trust in leaders
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Poor relationships between employees and leadership
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Little to no employee pride
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Not feeling valued at work
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Unchallenging work
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Lack of psychological safety
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Low availability (having inadequate mental and physical resources to work)
The Role of Motivation In The Workplace
Motivation is one of the most important aspects of work culture that can only exist with engagement. Within a disengaged team, motivation suffers, which causes issues of its own, such as stress, poor performance, and lack of confidence.
Work motivation can be defined as “a set of energetic forces that originate both within a beyond an individual’s being, to initiate work-related behavior.” It can be viewed as positive energy that leads to self-fulfillment. Employees need to be motivated at work to feel happy and satisfied, long-term, in their roles.
There are many types of employee motivation, including extrinsic (external factors), intrinsic (internal), social, monetary, recognition, and responsibility. Depending on the employee, different factors will be driving motivators, although all are essential to an engaged team.
Motivation can carry a company to unprecedented success as motivated employees help businesses with human capital management, employee efficiency, company goals, workforce stability, team relationships, and more. As employees become motivated, they create a better work experience for themselves. Teams become more innovative and productive, they experience higher morale, they build stronger work ethics, and, of course, they enhance job satisfaction.
Now - how do we actually go about motivating our employees and gaining these benefits? Read our article on 10 ways to engage employees at work and start transforming your team today.
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