Employee Engagement at Your Startup
2 comments / Posted on 21. Nov, 2008 by Austin Startup in Startup 101
Guest blogger Tim Wright is the principal of WrightResults, and blogs at CultureToEngage. Today he has some great information for us about the value and necessity of employee engagement in a startup.
Sometime between 1997 when it started and today, the Gallup Organization’s Q12 Survey made “employee engagement” one of the latest buzz phrases. In 2006, The Gallup Organization’s Q12 Survey had surveyed more than 4 million individuals. The baseline results:
- 29% of employees are actively engaged in what they do,
- 55% are not engaged, and
- 16% are actively disengaged.
Those 29% engaged in their functions are more productive, generate greater revenue, and increase customer loyalty. When employees become engaged and positive results are achieved, issues like patient satisfaction and employee retention get resolved.
Gallup research shows that the overwhelming contribution to the organization’s success is produced by engaged employees and that actively disengaged employees actually reduce the performance of the organization in the aggregate. (2002, Michael Echols, PhD., Bellevue University)
Employee Engagement: A New Buzzword
What does that mean for a technology startup company?
Heck of a lot. If it’s your startup
- You want to launch it successfully.
- You want to attract investors.
- You want to see it grow, either outlandishly or within measured reason.
- You want to be proud and happy about what you’ve done.
The engagement of the people you hire — whether full-time or part-time, salaried or waged, employed or contracted — contributes directly to each of those “wants.”
Would you be happy if less than 1/3 of those people contribute actively to success? I doubt it.
Here’s the most significant fact: an employee’s relationship with his/her manager is the primary driver of her/his engagement.
Research proves the familiar statement – people join companies but people leave supervisors and managers. The manager stimulates and continues employee engagement. The uninspiring, disinterested, and/or ineffective manager contributes directly to the absence of engagement.
It is old news that results come from performance and performance comes from engagement. It is perhaps newer that managers are the engagement catalysts for their people.
If yours is a small startup, you may be the sole manager. If you’ve brought several to manage the workforce, you’ll want to insure (develop) common excellence among the managers regarding employee engagement.
The more expertise a manager has with the following, the more readily that manager contributes to employees’ engagement:
- Trust-building techniques
- Activities to generate true commitment
- Spontaneous leadership skills and attributes
- Communication and listening excellence
- Coaching abilities
- Conflict (esp. Generation) preclusion
How much attention are you giving these areas that are critical to engagement by your entire employee base?
 |
Posted by Austin Startup
http://www.austinstartup.com |
-
Tim Wright