What is Employee Engagement? The Meaning, Need, and Types Explained

In this ever-evolving world of business, where an employee is not simply an asset but the driving force behind an organization, the need for employee engagement kicks in. Now, imagine a workplace where each and every employee is not merely completing his 8 or 9 hours but actively contributing.

What a wonderful scenario it would be! Employee engagement is not simply a buzzword but a basic practice that should be inherent in a company’s work policy. This is not a “one-size-fits-all” notion; its intensity and scale might change based on the industry. It allows an organization to achieve workforce efficiency with a happy workforce!

Meaning of Employee Engagement

This concept implies an emotional and professional connection of an employee with the organization, which depicts his/her enthusiasm and dedication towards the company. After all, happy staff leads to a happy company that increases productivity manifolds.

Employee engagement can be associated with happiness or satisfaction, but not entirely, as it signifies something different. It can be assessed easily using analytical insights gathered through employee monitoring software.

Leapmax is here to help in this regard. An employee who achieves a real sense of fulfillment while working for the company and cares for his job and colleagues with complete diligence can be called an engaged employee in the true sense.

Types of Employee Engagement

1. Cognitive Engagement

Cognitive engagement is involved if an employee is keenly committed to the job and the company’s values. Employees are so deeply aligned with their assigned tasks that they exude complete diligence to achieve the same and maintain their performance.

Employees’ complete awareness of what is expected of them and their role in improving the organization’s efficiency is the cognitive dimension of engagement.

2. Emotional Engagement

As the name suggests, emotional engagement is where employees’ emotions are closely tied to their work, colleagues, managers, and the company. This type of engagement reveals how closely an employee has attached his/her feelings to the professional life.

Emotionally engaged employees channel positive feelings to their work and work hard to achieve complete job satisfaction. A high level of employee engagement motivates employees to increase their workplace productivity.

3. Physical Engagement

Physical engagement involves all the activities that showcase their physical and mental involvement in the job. It involves the attitude of employees towards their work, how much they are invested in doing the tasks, and how much energy they invest while working for the company.

Physically engaged employees exude an improvement mindset and are likely to take any skill upliftment opportunity that they come across. An employee’s physical engagement level can be understood through its behavior analytics.

In a nutshell, engagement with employees is a framework that considers how employees feel at work. Considering employees’ mindsets to employ relevant employee engagement programs is important. An employee monitoring tool can help generate easy user behavior analytics to assess their engagement levels.

The Need for Employee Engagement

Employee or workforce engagement is the enthusiasm level beyond mere job satisfaction, which drives employees to perform their best to reach and even surpass the set organizational goals.

The growth an employee and the organization see through this behavior is immense. Such behavior builds loyalty and improves an organization’s operational efficiency and performance.

The following aspects will shed more light on its need.

1. Enhancement in Productivity levels

As per Gallup’s report on employee engagement, a highly engaged workforce has 18% higher productivity (in sales) and 23% higher profitability than a disengaged one.

Employees with high engagement rates tend to invest more in the tasks assigned and the company’s development. This, in turn, helps in the overall growth of companies as if an employee’s productivity is high, then the combination of the workforce as a whole is much higher!

2. Increase in Talent Retention

Organizations with good levels of employee engagement witness low absenteeism and employee burnout since the workforce is much more satisfied with their jobs and the work environment. This, in turn, lowers the employee turnover rate.

Engaged employees are also happier and more loyal than disengaged ones. This benefits the organization by retaining and upskilling the talent pool that is available to them. Therefore, it highlights the importance of workforce engagement management.

3. Constructing a Culture of Positive Workspace

The culture of engagement in an organization drives better communication and collaboration within. On the contrary, workplaces with low levels of engagement have driven out 20% of US employees in the last five years, increasing the turnover cost to more than $223 Bn!

A good level of engagement with employees supports removing all the workplace disruptions that might arise due to low confidence in employees, communication gaps in teams, or unnecessary work scheduling.

4. Enhanced Levels of Customer Satisfaction

If employees are happier and more satisfied with their jobs, they tend to do it more enthusiastically to maintain and even uplift the company’s image in the eyes of their clients and customers by improving workplace productivity.

Now, it is simple logic to understand that happier and more fruitful employees tend to reflect the same in their customer interactions. Employees now take care of their time and the client’s time to resolve any query if it may arise, leading to higher satisfaction levels.

Because of all these reasons mentioned above, finding creative ways to engage employees and improve employee engagement levels is necessary.

Conclusion

It can be implied that engaging with employees is not an option but necessary for all businesses to grow and improve their performance and overall success. A leader should know how to manage their remote workforce per the company’s goals without compromising their time and health.

A time tracking software may help understand where the time goes for an individual employee, but managing it and keeping his satisfaction intact is a big challenge that must be catered to with skillful communication and collaboration.

If you are facing a situation of disengaged employees, study their behavior and patterns to guess the type of employee they are and take corrective measures accordingly. Leapmax may help you with user insights, but using them is completely in your hands!

So, don’t delay and correct all diversions to success; it is time to take the Leap!