How to help employees reap benefits of better engagement

Empower employees to own their engagement, rather than leaving it as a human-resources initiative. Photo / AP

Employee engagement has been a thoroughly researched construct in recent organisational literature. Its importance has been established through research into increased productivity, organisational profitability and decreased turnover. But how can organisations engage their employees to reap these benefits?

One method is to empower employees to own their engagement, rather than leaving it as a human-resources initiative.

Warehouse Stationery is an example of an organisation which has facilitated and encouraged employees to own their engagement. Its high employee-engagement scores last year led to it winning the large-organisation category of JRA's Best Workplaces Survey 2010, and positioned it as an organisation with the most improvement in its performance score.

Anna Campbell, general manager of human resources, says: "The HR team facilitates the process and owns the framework, as well as providing support and guidance for the managers, but the managers and team members own what they do everyday."

Campbell says it is important that engagement is made real for all employees, rather than a "tick-the-box" process owned by HR.

This ownership of engagement was also facilitated through Warehouse Stationery's post-survey process. Following its completion of the JRA Best Workplaces Survey, it fed results back to staff. This allowed each team or store to look at its results and find areas where improvements could be made.

Typically, two main areas are chosen for the organisation to focus on, based on the results. Individual teams and stores then choose an additional area specific to their own results. These combined focus areas will be used to improve engagement over the next year. Warehouse Stationery has found that this shared ownership in the business makes engagement real for everyone, as teams are in charge of owning and acting on their results.

Clearly engagement is not just something that is "ticked off a list" but rather something that is inherent to the organisation's culture.
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JRA is running the 2011 JRA Best Workplaces Survey in association with The New Zealand Herald and sponsored by the New Zealand Chambers of Commerce, Kiwibank, and HainesAttract. The survey runs from June 1 to August 31 and registrations are now being taken.