Employee Engagement is the extent to which workforce commitment, both emotional and intellectual, exists relative to accomplishing the work, mission, and vision of the organization. Engagement can be seen as a heightened level of ownership where each employee wants to do whatever they can for the benefit of their internal and external customers, and for the success of the organization as a whole.
It’s not your plans that are important; it’s whether you can implement them. A good strategy is a fine thing, but it is useless unless you can make it happen. Making it happen depends to a large degree on your people, and therein lies the power of morale.
It sounds like a circular argument, but it is true: Simply measuring morale and feeding back the results, when carried out correctly, improves morale. Over and over again, employees have thanked us for being in their organization, collecting their opinions and letting them know how they and their colleagues feel as a group.
Organizations selected by Fortune and the UK equivalent Sunday Times Best Places to Work, trumpet their appearance on such lists in recruitment advertising, not just at the point of sale like at Starbucks, but also in newspaper and online ads. They are eager to let the world know how good it is to work for them.
Stripped of the dramas created by negative morale situations and the challenges of dealing with people who like to perpetuate them (from individuals with no management responsibility to managers themselves), the high morale workplace becomes less fearful, stressful and more “fun.” Management time can be focused on things that make the organization more productive, not just “putting out fires” related to personnel, or replacing the people who have left.
Plenty of evidence exists for all of these claims; in fact the evidence is so overwhelming that it is hard to imagine why organizations do not implement practices that would lead to a maximum level of morale, even if only to gain just these advantages; and yet many do not.
There is strong evidence from multiple and highly credible sources that morale is positively correlated with higher stock prices, higher earnings per share, and even five year survival following an IPO.
High Morale Organizations Can Have Higher Customer Satisfaction than Low Morale Ones
A great deal of research shows the morale-customer satisfaction connection, and demonstrates causal connections between the two.
Morale is a Leading Indicator and Allows Organizations to Prevent Potential Negative Situations
By examining trends based on previous employee survey data you have collected, you can have a sense of how the future will play out if you take no action. This is especially true when a poorly performing manager is having a negative effect on employee morale.
The Morale Process Is One of the Most Democratic Activities in Which an Organization Can Participate
There is nothing quite like giving every single person who works in an organization the chance to say exactly what they feel, knowing that top management will look at every piece of data and every written word.
High Morale at the Individual Level Is Connected To Job Performance by That Person, and Is As Good a Predictor of That Performance as Other, Well Tested Measures
Multiple studies now demonstrate that there are few activities one can undertake better than knowing a person’s individual level of morale, in order to predict how they will perform on the job.