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.

Employee Engagement: Engaging Your ‘Older’ Workers

Pop Quiz: Which is the fastest growing segment of the working population in the USA (and probably Canada as well)? If you’re about to answer: Millennials, you would be…. wrong! Despite the fact that the millennial generation is getting the most press, publicity, and attention these days (including from yours truly – mea culpa), the […]

Why Employees in Small Businesses Are More Engaged

When it comes to employee engagement in small businesses, they’re doing something right. TalentMap’s 2017 Employee Engagement Benchmarks study reports organizations with fewer than 250 employees have a collective engagement score of 86 percent. In short, that’s a sizable 13 percentage points higher than the overall score (73 percent) for organizations of all sizes. Mid-sized organizations with […]

Employee Engagement In Not-For-Profits: Doing It For The Cause

Having recently completed a number of engagement surveys and workshops in North America’s cause-driven non-profit sector (i.e. mostly charitable organizations), I’ve been struck by the enormity of the challenges many of these organizations face. Yet I also continue to be highly impressed by the high-level of resilience of their employees in the face of these […]

Employee Engagement in Municipalities: Unique Challenges and Solutions

If the number of surveys and workshops we do for municipalities is any indicator, these organizations have been getting on the employee engagement bandwagon in a major way over the past several years. The case for higher employee engagement in municipalities is clear: higher productivity, better retention, lower absenteeism, better citizen/ratepayer experience, and the list goes […]

Employee Engagement Drives Customer Satisfaction

Engaged employees provide services with pride which can improve customer satisfaction. This is especially important for customer-facing service industries like financial, government, and healthcare sectors. Study after study has shown employee engagement is a predictor of how employees deliver services and how their behavior, in turn, affects customer satisfaction. ISS, a provider of facility services around the world, amassed more than […]

Employee Engagement Best Practices

The first step to improving employee engagement is to ask your employees how they feel and what they think can be done to improve the workplace. The next step is taking action on those results. These actions will be different for each organization, depending on the size, resources, and culture of the organization. There is […]

Employee Engagement Best Practice Series: Setting Up Your Employee Engagement Committee

This is the second in my series of “best practice” blogs on measuring and improving employee engagement. In this series, I’m answering a number of questions which are often asked by our network in terms of how to measure and, more importantly, improve employee engagement. One of the things that tends to perplex many of […]

DIY or Outsourced Employee Engagement Surveys?

What does workplace breach of confidentiality mean? Well, what if you were to say something disparaging about Big Boss, to someone you “trust”, yet somehow Big Boss learns about those criticisms? For a good many employees, worry about confidentiality is an oppressive fear factor when an Employee Engagement survey arrives in their inbox. “Just how secure are my comments?” […]

Decline of the Employee Engagement Empire

Estimates peg the amount of money spent conducting surveys, doing action plans and marshalling resources around the concept of employee engagement in the $720 million USD range in North America. Yet the number of disengaged employees is on the rise. Forbes recently showcased a study by Aon Hewitt that revealed employee engagement dipped for the first […]

Are Millennial Problems Just The Tip Of The Iceberg?

“Coddled, entitled, self-involved and lazy? Are Millennials really that bad?” Based on her experience, Adrienne Batra Editor-in-Chief at the Toronto Sun thinks so. “We love to hate on them” she pronounced likening Millennials to “the kid we want to pick on in the school yard.” Batra’s comments were part of a nationally televised debate exploring […]