Can Employee Engagement Become a Competitive Advantage?
By: Etienne R. LeGrand, CEO Vivify Performance
Increasingly people want to be connected to jobs with greater meaning and purpose. Education is an industry that offers this in spades, even as its pay for educators, in particular isn’t as competitive as professions with similar education requirements. School districts with high emotional engagement (produced mostly by meaningful relationships) could become a key part of an employees’ experience that both bridges the pay gap and creates a competitive advantage.
The truth of the matter is that pay is no longer enough to attract and retain top talent. Recent initiatives that aimed to entice high-performance teachers to teach in low-performance schools, bears this out as teachers rejected the opportunity to earn additional compensation for the privilege.
Engagement describes the basic psychological needs that must be met if employees are to perform their work well. It includes having the materials you need and knowing what’s expected of you. It also includes emotional and social needs that come from doing work connected to a higher purpose and doing what you’re good at. It is not an activity, a fringe benefit or an incentive program.
Engagement influences employees’ experience in schools and in the district.
Engagement can be created daily through a district’s culture, relationships and by aligning employees more closely to the purpose of enabling and promoting learning among students. Engaged employees feel supported and are coached and given regular feedback that builds on their strengths.
Unsurprisingly, middle managers such as department heads play a powerful role when it comes to employee engagement. “Mid-level office staff emerge as pivotal actors in the two way translation and communication between top leadership and school-level staff around initiatives,” says Dr. Patricia Burch and Dr. James Spillane. Gallup Research attributes 70% of variance in employee engagement to managers.
Your employees’ mindset and behavior when they arrive to work each day has a major impact on what they think about working in your district. Sounds simple enough, yet most employees don’t have their basic psychological needs met.
According to Gallup Research:
Only three in 10 employees strongly agree they have the materials and equipment they need to do their work right.
Four in 10 employees strongly agree that when they are at work, they have the opportunity to do what they do best every day.
Three in 10 employees strongly agree that in the last seven days they have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
Globally, only 15% of employees are engaged at work. In the U.S., 33% are engaged. That’s quite a bit of untapped horsepower.
Educational leaders have to think about everything from aligning employees to purpose and meaning to a culture that encourages and engages employees to perform at their best. Employee engagement isn’t a panacea for what ails a school district, yet it shouldn’t be overlooked.
If your culture doesn’t recognize and appreciate your employees’ efforts and employees they don’t have opportunities to grow and develop, they will feel disconnected from whatever experience you are trying to create through school improvement and transformation programs. Some employees will leave, while those who remain may not be as productive as they could be.
If leaders fail to meet the minimum expectations of employees today, nothing else matters. High emotionally engaged workplaces feel different. Instead of employees dreading Monday morning, they are more excited to return to work and work more productively when they’re there.
Engagement can become the difference between an employee choosing your school district, staying at your school district and saying good things about your district when they leave.