Category: Employee Engagement

TalentMap has studied employee engagement and human behavior for more than 20 years. Through this research, TalentMap has clearly proven that managers are the critical link to influencing employees’ performance and success.

High-performance managers increase productivity and success by leading with a focus on employee engagement. They consistently create an engaging environment that energizes and motivates employees and teams. And TalentMap and others have established that high levels of employee engagement link to nine critical performance outcomes.

With a high-performance manager in place, everything goes well for a team. People love their jobs, they are productive, customers are engaged, and the organization grows. When the wrong person is manager, nothing fixes it. Not compensation, not benefits, nothing. One of the greatest challenges you face as a manager is to enhance employee and team performance.

In most organizations, managers are accountable for five important activities:
1. Recruitment/Talent Selection – Recruiting and selecting employees with talent that matches the best performers and that has the potential for excellence in the role.
2. Development – Supporting employees to garner the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to develop their talents into strengths and express those strengths as proficiency and excellence in their roles.
3. Employee Engagement – Creating a work environment where employees are enthusiastic about and involved in their work and the organization as a whole.
4. Performance Management – Helping employees meet and exceed the results and outcomes they are expected to contribute to the organization.
5. Promotion or Transition – Enabling and supporting employees to advance to a new role and/or set of responsibilities that are suitable for their strengths, current stage of development, or life circumstances.

You are responsible for creating an engaged, committed team and holding your employees accountable for their performance. This employee engagement guide provides insights to help you build an engaged, committed, and high-performing team.

Uniting Unions in Support of Employee Engagement

Like cilantro, it’s an either-or kind of thing. Either your organization and unions like one another and get along palatably. Or you don’t. Many of us have had a first-hand (or maybe arm’s length) experience from one side of the fence or the other. For unionized organizations intending to introduce or raise employee engagement levels, […]

The Powerful Relationship of Engagement to Performance

Thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sunni mystic, Rumi, once ruminated, “Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.” Unlocking the heart’s desire is at the very core of employee engagement. But engagement isn’t just a warmhearted, convivial sort of thing. Engagement is part of […]

Turn March Madness Into April Advantage: Engage the Hearts and Minds of Sport Enthusiasts

It started with Super Bowl Sunday. This year roughly 103.4 million people watched the Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots. Seemingly some 16.5 million people or one in ten Americans skipped work the next day, according to CNBC, costing employers somewhere in the vicinity of $3 billion. Then crossing oceans and time zones, for […]

Skilled Labor Shortages Threaten Growth: How to Gain the Upper Hand with Employee Engagement

It’s midway through 2018. The economy continues to expand. The talent pool continues to contract. Skilled labor shortages are prolific. No sector is immune. Employers predict wage increases. They say this elevated demand for labor is constraining growth. They report losing out on business. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, as an example: A […]

Millennial Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Expectations Fuel Employee Engagement

Millennials are the dominant force in today’s work world and their drum-call for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) keeps getting louder and more persistent. Business pundits and scholars point to growing evidence between CSR and employee engagement. One of those studies, out of IBM Global Services, found 44 percent of young professionals wouldn’t consider an employer with a bad […]

Measuring Up: Tools of the Employee Engagement Trade

Landscape masters Claude Monet and JMW Turner surveyed the lay of the land and painted what they saw, each with their own interpretation and style. Likewise, your organization’s senior leaders look at their employee landscape, interpret what they perceive, and paint a mental picture with broad sweeping strokes. While interpretive creative license has a place […]

Managing Generational Gaps in the Workplace

Do Age Differences Really Matter? Check out some of the online genealogy sites that help trace family lineage and history. The generally accepted time between generations averages 20 to 25 years (from the birth of a parent to the birth of a child). With good health extending our life expectancies in North America it’s not inconceivable our […]

Links Between Employee Engagement and Organizational Success

“People create organizations, therefore the concepts and systems of any organization must reflect the diversity and complexity of the people who comprise it.” What a great quote. Altruistic, yet oh so true; employee engagement stripped to the bare bones. Kevin Fong, a proponent of Eastern traditions and philosophies, offers this golden nugget in his paper, The […]

Leave it to Self: Unleash Engagement through Empowerment

When you do an internet search and look up employee engagement tips or employee engagement ideas what you’ll find is the majority, in fact almost all the topics are what executives can do or what managers can do. Very few ideas or suggestions look at what employees can do to drive engagement. At a talk […]

Leadership and Employee Engagement

How to connect with 10,000 employees (more or less) Leaders often ask me what the most “highly engaged” organizations do differently that engages their employees. While there are a number of key drivers of engagement that highly engaged organizations tend to do well, I have come to observe one consistent difference. That difference is how […]