Engage Employees to Improve Performance

Bret L. Simon wrote about angagement and performance on his blog (http://www.bretlsimmons.com/2010-07/employee-engagement-and-performance-finally-some-credible-evidence/). His blog is good to HR manager or people who interrest why engagement can improve organization performance. He also describe engagement and performance on www.baldrge.com on July 20th, 2010 as follow.

A study of 245 firefighters and their supervisors has shown that job engagement is a significant predictor of task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. The study, which is behind a firewall, is described by Bret L. Simmons on his blog.
The researchers measured job engagement through 18 questions organized by physical engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement. According to the article abstract, they found that “engagement, conceptualized as the investment of an individual’s complete self to a role, provides a more comprehensive explanation of relationships with performance relative to well-known concepts that reflect narrower aspects of the individual’s self.” The researchers were able to evaluate the impact of other factors including job involvement, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation on performance and behavior; they concluded these factors did not predict performance and behavior while engagement did.
According to Simmons, the researchers identified three antecedents of engagement: value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluations. In other words, hire people who share and support your organization’s mission and values and who are self-sufficient and confident, and then provide development opportunities that align with your organizational values and your employees’ developmental needs.
In “Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement,” I wrote about a Gallup report that came to similar conclusions. Gallup defined a fully-engaged employee as emotionally attached to the unit and rationally loyal and found that “organizations that employ performance optimization management principles have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth.”
In “Employee Engagement and the Bottom Line,” I pointed to two specific cases where employee engagement had a direct correlation with financial results:
• Best Buy sees a $100,000 annual increase in sales at any location where employee engagement rises 2%.
• JC Penny had 67% of its employee engaged in 2005 and 80% engaged in 2009. Its earnings per share growth over the last five years is five times the industry average.
The key to getting similar results at your organization is to: (1) figure out how to measure employee engagement as the researchers quoted above have done; (2) use your measurement tool to assess engagement; (3) identify opportunities to improve performance; and, (4) close the gap.
To read more about employee engagement, click on these articles:
• What Drives You?
• Paying Disengaged Employees
• Why HR Needs Baldrige
• Recruiting, Retaining, and Engaging
• Valuing Employees – and HR

Source: http://www.baldrige.com/criteria_workforce/engage-employees-to-improve-performance/