Archive for Employee Engagement
Make Employees Happy by Nurturing Their Social Networks
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Nurture employees social networks
When the prestigious Harvard Business Review devotes most of an issue to happiness, you know that happiness is a serious topic. The magazine cover is entitled “The Value of Happiness: How Employee Well-Being Drives Profits.”
I particularly enjoyed the interview of Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert in an article entitled The Science Behind the Smile. He’s the author of the international best seller Stumbling on Happiness. The study of happiness has devolved into a science whereby you can measure a person’s happiness at a moment in time. Science is in. Intuition about someone’s happiness is out.
What Makes Employees Happy?
Dr. Gilbert is quite clear about what makes employees happy. He says that people are happiest when they are appropriately challenged, “when they’re trying to achieve goals that are difficult but not out of reach.” He adds, “Challenge and threat are not the same thing. People blossom when challenged and wither when threatened.”
When threatened, an employee will get the work done, he says, but thereafter do his best to undermine you, will feel no loyalty to the organization and never do more than he must. But employees will flourish when rewarded, based on a century of psychologists studying reward and punishment. Read More→
Employee Engagement = Improved Financial Performance
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A highly engaged workforce translates into improved financial performance for companies. You’d expect that, wouldn’t you? Yet many companies with command and control structures still don’t get it.
Because jobs are scarce now, senior management of these laggards don’t feel the need to engage with employees to reach the shared goal of making the company great. As a result, according to an Aon Hewitt study, companies that don’t fit its “Best Employers” category are losing shareholder value.
Smart companies understand, however, that an engaged workforce is a productive workforce. Read More→
The Power of Small Wins in Our Inner Work Lives
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Do you ever wonder if all the work you’re putting in is making a difference? I know I do. We envy the “stars” in our professions. But they got to where they are with a succession of small wins that add up to major progress and their huge success.
In her book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, co-author and Harvard professor Teresa Amabile describes how even small, incremental wins can have a major positive influence on what she terms an employee’s “inner work life.”
Finding Meaningful Work
Perceptions, emotions and motivations influence inner work life, but the single most important factor “is simply making progress on work they find meaningful.” Even the most trivial wins can affect performance. On the flip side, a trivial negative experience can have two to three times the impact as a positive experience. Read More→
