Do you want to keep your employees engaged and motivated?
There are three levels of employee engagement. It’s essential to know which level your team is at. That way, you can work on improving their engagement and provide the right level of support.
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement refers to how interested and invested employees are in working for your company. Engaged employees want to work harder for you because their passion lies with the company's mission. They're also more productive because they’re intrinsically motivated by the work, not the paycheck.
Several factors could affect how connected employees feel toward an organization. These include resources, opportunities, people, company culture, and more.
What are the 3 levels of engagement?
20 years back, Gallup developed the employee engagement framework, consisting of three levels. Its purpose is to help you better track how committed and dedicated your employees are. The levels are: actively engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged.
1. Actively engaged
Actively engaged employees are productive, enthusiastic workers committed to the company's mission and their own roles.
These employees actively contribute to the organization by giving their best when it comes to extra effort and talent. Additionally, they show initiative, passion, creativity, optimism, loyalty, resilience, and strong work ethic.
To pinpoint who your actively engaged employees are, you'll notice that they:
- Make suggestions to improve processes and products. They're creative and innovative thinkers, too.
- Take initiatives that help move the company forward. They don't wait for someone else to do it or take action before them (even if they weren’t assigned to do so).
- Promote the company's vision and culture.
- Display pride for their organization. It’s clear in how they represent the company during events, interviews, or conferences.
- Go above and beyond their job descriptions and responsibilities.
- Show resilience in the face of challenges and stress. They may even volunteer to take on extra responsibilities when needed.
- Have an optimistic outlook about the company's future.
- Mingle well with their coworkers and supervisors. They have meaningful relationships with peers and managers.
2. Not engaged
This level of engagement is what you could consider the middle ground. Not engaged employees are indifferent or neutral toward their jobs and organizations. They'll do only what's expected of them but not much beyond that.
These employees won't actively contribute to the company's success. They also won't be proactive about improving it. Instead, they go through the motions and don't strive to perform better or work harder. Most often, their jobs are something they do eight hours a day to collect their paychecks.
To identify not engaged workers, look out for these traits:
- They do just enough to get by and nothing else.
- They don't offer suggestions to improve processes and products. They may even ignore their problems or not acknowledge them to save face.
- They're resistant toward change and growth–they prefer the status quo over improvements.
- They may complain about what's wrong with the company one minute, then get disengaged the next.
- Unwillingness to go above and beyond their job descriptions or responsibilities.
- Negative attitudes toward organizational mission and vision.
- Rather than being team players, they're loners who prefer working independently from others.
Not engaged employees sometimes need a little extra push to become actively engaged.
3. Actively disengaged
Lastly, actively disengaged employees are a far cry from the best and most productive workers. They're negative, cynical, and resentful toward their company and what they do for a living. They may even sabotage its success just for kicks.
Actively disengaged employees show these traits:
- They make it clear through their words and actions that they don't want to be at the company. They may even be applying for other jobs.
- They undermine their coworkers, supervisors, and teams in subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways. For example, they'll take credit for someone else's effort. Or, they'll claim that their poor performance is due to insufficient support.
- They're vocal about what's wrong with the company. They sometimes take this negative talk outside of work boundaries to turn other people against it.
- They're not open to change and learning. They also don't embrace opportunities to improve the company.
- They'll complain about what's wrong with the organization rather than proposing solutions. They also don't try to fix things themselves.
Rather than being team players, actively disengaged employees are all about "my way or the highway." They often bring more harm than good to their teams and workgroups.
How do you measure employee engagement?
When it comes to measuring employee engagement, you have many options. For instance, you can conduct a survey or a questionnaire that asks employees some questions about their attitude toward work, preferences, and relationships.
Or, you can choose an engagement assessment tool. It could feature workplace simulations or activities to measure their levels of engagement.
Other than that, one-on-one meetings, focus groups, clear employee goals, and transparent communication are great ideas, too.
Boost employee engagement with a team building retreat
Boosting employee engagement doesn't have to be difficult. For instance, you can hold a team-building retreat. Retreats help employees develop relationships by learning about themselves and their coworkers.
Every company is different and every employee is unique, you'll want to plan your team-building retreat based on that. That’s what Surf Office is here to help – contact us to discuss your requirements.
