“Employee engagement” is another one of those buzz terms with which you probably want to pepper your conversation the next time you have a meeting with any senior executive. But putting sarcasm and cynicism aside for a moment, employee engagement is a big deal for a variety of reasons—one of the big ones being innovation.
You can label it whatever you want, but it’s been measured and proven that employees who are actively involved, who actually care about what they’re doing, are more creative and innovative. According to Entrepreneur magazine, a Harvard Business Review study found that if employee engagement increased by just 0.1 percent, it made a $100,000 difference in operating income to the bottom line of every Best Buy store annually. And the study also found that recognition was the single most important factor when it came to engagement.
If you’re not already a fan of The Esquire Guy, you may want to check out his regular column in Entrepreneur, because there’s always some very sound advice that’s dispensed with a good dose of not taking yourself or the workplace too seriously. This month’s focused on employee engagement and recognition and provided 11 “recommendations” for giving praise. Three were especially noteworthy, as well as humorous:
1) Praise followed by criticism is not praise.
2) Praise followed by praise is probably a little too much praise.
3) Praise followed by criticism followed by praise is a sandwich.
Pretty much common sense and pretty funny, but how many of us have made all three mistakes? Ah, I thought so. Maybe not so funny now.
When it comes to innovation, you need to have people who not only care about the job at hand, but think beyond that about how they can do things better, or maybe even entirely different. That’s engagement.
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