Employee engagement is on you and me. True engagement is a personal choice. Maybe you don’t how or where to engage but even engaging to find those answers is a critical personal choice. In the last two blog posts we have explored engagement from the organizational level on how to enable engagement and from the leadership level on how to support engagement. Now, we will highlight how to personally engage which, bottom line, is what truly matters.

Let us start with these questions: 

Are you personally engaged? 

I mean truly engaged?

Do you come in each day to complete your tasks to the highest level and go home satisfied you have earned your pay check? 

If so, great! But I challenge you and say there is so much more for you to engage in and contribute to. Organizational performance is evolving and rapidly changing and it requires each of us to actively engage in making success happen versus passively existing and expecting success will just happen to us.

There has not been one employee engagement survey conducted that produced greater employee engagement just by delivering the results of the survey. Not one PowerPoint presentation that explains the power of engaged employees and the initiative’s suggested to improve engagement that has actually engaged any individual employee. It is all just engagement talk, not personal, active engagement.

The only path to improved employee engagement is for each of us as employees to actually engage and stay engaged. We don’t need to wait for an annual survey to tell us we need better engagement. In over 20 years of conducting and looking at employee engagement surveys and scores, only one 500 plus employee organization out of hundreds we have worked with had 98 percent actively employee engagement, no other even comes close….just one!  And it took 2 years of enabling and supporting by the organization and leadership, with a focus on engagement, to achieve such success. 

So where can we personally engage?

Areas like engaging more actively in your personal performance. Try proactively setting expectations with your manager not your manager setting the expectations with you. And then you setting time on their calendar to actively lead every 6-week performance discussion on your progress to those expectations. That is active engagement!

• Engage in change – see possibilities in everything, think disruptively and create options and recommendations for change.  Don’t just embrace change, engage in change.
• Engage in developing authentic relationships, move from transactional interactions to investing in building authentic relationships.
• Engage through accepting personal accountability no matter what.  Make things happen, don’t let things drift and just happen.
• Engage with a purpose, find your purpose beyond delivering a task. Come in each day with your task to contribute to a more meaningful purpose in your work.
• Engage by either volunteering for or jump-starting an employee-led engagement team within your organization. Get involved!

There is a lot of talk right now about engagement, but the bottom line is that to get more engagement we have to be the ones to more actively engage.

For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!

Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.