Worldspan Group

Employee Engagement vs Employee Compliance

Employee engagement is about appealing to the hearts, minds and hands of your staff and gaining their heartfelt commitment to the cause. Commonly, however, organisations can only gain an employee’s compliance which involves just the hands.

There are 4 common key factors in interacting with your employees that will help in creating that desired level of commitment*:

Clarity - every employee must clearly understand what the goal is and they can articulate it to others

Relevance - every employee can see the relevance of the goal to business success

Meaning - they can see the personal meaning of the goal - what does it mean to them and how does it resonate with their personal values

Involvement - most importantly, they have the choice to be involved in shaping and implementing the goal either directly or through another.

*(Belgard-Fisher-Rayner)

Top 10 tips for running Successful Employee Workshops

1. Create  an appealing environment - a light, airy comfortable venue and appropriate table & chair layout
2. Offer the opportunity for groups to mingle before, during and after to assist in natural ice-breaking
3. Offer refreshments throughout to ensure the mind and body is ‘on the job’ and concentration levels are high
4. Provide plenty of breaks to cater for natural attention spans and allow time to absorb and reflect
5. Use a range of stimulating media to structure the learning process
6. Create workshop materials with a laser-like focus on the objective you are trying to achieve
7. Train the presenters and facilitators beforehand and ensure their skills, techniques and knowledge are up to speed to maximise the workshop
8. Capture the output and use that intelligence in future communications strategies - close the loop and don’t let the feedback get lost
9. Keep to time and keep the agenda moving
10. Provide plenty of opportunity to feedback during and after - verbally and/or in writing

Formulas for Business Success through Motivation

P = A x M

Performance equals Ability multiplied by Motivation*

Attract and recruit the Ability in the form of best in class employees, then Motivate to maximise their performance.

R = eM x iM

Retention of your best employees requires the combination of extrinsic Motivation i.e. money, awards, recognition for completing work well at the request of the organisation, as well as appealing to the intrinsic Motivation of the individual i.e. purpose, meaning and shared values. The challenge lies in businesses finding a way to turn these intrinsic ‘keys’ through their vision and mission statements and the development of organisational values that resonate with their employees as well as their external customers.

*(Imparato & Harari)