There
has been so much written about Employee Engagement that it has frankly become a
confusing catchall for almost everything related to employee performance. It means different things to different people
and certainly all types of vendors and consultants have found a home in this
umbrella in order to sell their services.
As
employee engagement is essentially a behavior change initiative, the incentive
industry was implementing employee engagement activities long before the phrase
was ever coined. Multi-million dollar “incentive companies” emerged in the
mid-20th century to sell programs to motivate company employees
(either internal or external) to improve their performance in a variety of
ways. These programs were very
successful and did drive performance because they used motivation techniques
invented by the award industry….techniques that are still very prominent
today.
Following
is a synopsis of an article written by Paul Herr, Author of “Primal Management: Unraveling the
Secrets of Human Motivation that Drive High Performance”, that
is as good a treatment of the connection between employee motivation and employee
engagement as we have ever read.
ZERO
MOTIVATION, no
work would get done and the company would go bankrupt.
OPTIMAL
MOTIVATION,
everyone works faster, better and smarter, so productivity, innovation,
customer satisfaction and profits would sky rocket.
THE MASTER METRIC, Motivation drives everything happening
inside companies and it should be tracked religiously.
THE STORY
The
term “employee engagement” was popularized by the Gallup Organization about 30
years ago. It gained the attention of
the business community by aiming its statistical prowess at human motivation. Prior
to that there were no stats to determine if satisfied employees were more
productive than unsatisfied employees.
By
reviewing all the top theories of psychologists dealing with human motivation,
Gallup then created hundreds of questions based on
these theories and started testing them to see which ones statistically
correlated with business performance.
The result of this gargantuan effort was the Gallup Q-12
survey—12 questions which has been extremely important in measuring
motivation. And employee engagement has
become a top business priority for senior executives. To read the entire article click here.
For more information on
Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please
contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net
