Engaging employees for greater productivity
Create a sense of belonging and company advocates
An engaged workforce can have a significant impact on an organisation’s performance. Employees who have a greater sense of belonging, believe in the goals of the organisation, and share a common understanding of the behaviour needed to carryout key tasks are far more productive.
With the cost of disengagement for Australian business estimated at more than $39 billion a year significant business benefits can be gained through employee engagement including:
- higher operating incomes
- net income growth and earnings per share
- higher retention rates
Section 12 of Where is your next worker? examines:
- Beating the skills shortage by engaging your employees
- The challenges of engaging employees
- Policy opening the way
- Reflecting on the business opportunities
- Case study: Working As One.
Reflections on the business opportunities
- Are your employees just cruising or truly engaged? How are you measuring this?
- What are you doing to understand the individual needs, drivers and motivations of your employees?
- How systematically are you tapping into the needs and drivers of individual workers to help productivity?
- What strategies or recognition and reward programs have you implemented to encourage your employees to behave as one team?
- Do people in your organisation have radically different mental models of how they are supposed to work together?
- How are you mapping this and what strategies do you have in place to ensure you are dealing with this effectively?
Working As One
Leaders need to understand employees as individuals. The marketing industry discusses the virtues of marketing to the ‘category of one’ or the unified group: this can be applied equally to employees. Understanding and acting on individual employee’ needs and preferences is the key to achieving greater individual effort and increased rates of retention.
An article in the May 2011 edition of AFR Boss provided an overview of global logistics giant Brambles CEO Tom Gorman’s efforts to engage employees, foster collective action and enhance productivity.
Gorman applied a focus on making personal connections between people from Brambles subsidiaries in different regions to foster informal networks. Detailed analysis of how his top 1000 staff were working ‘as one’ led to significant insights that reshaped his strategy-setting and transformation efforts.
Productivity: Where is your next worker?
|
|
Enhancing workforce productivity to beat the skills crisis The combination of Australia’s national productivity decline since the late 1990s and the looming skills shortage, means businesses need to consider new and better ways to get work done. |
 |
Developing workforce talents and skills for evolving roles Personal growth and internal mobility strategies are the key for many businesses as they overlook the enormous potential of their own staff in the struggle to meet skills shortages and the race to recruit external talent. |
|
|
Succession planning required to retain future leaders With the danger of losing key staff and future leaders, business needs to consider how to retain the best people, including those at the beginning and the end of their careers. |
Talk to us
 David |
 Pip |
Where is your next worker?
Video [03:35]
Where is your next worker? addresses the positive actions business and government can take to maintain momentum in the face of a looming national skills shortage