We all hear that strong employee engagement is good for your organization, but is it really? Are engagement consultants and workplace improvement organizations just trumping up the value of engagement so they can sell their services to you? Are they telling you how bad your engagement is so they can show you how good their solution is?

Maybe. But how is employee engagement good for your bottom line? Before we consider that, let’s review what employee engagement is.

There are different...

As the head of Human Resources for our company, I have a vision for our employees. It comes down to five words. We want to be:

• Person-centric
• Performance-minded
• Strengths-based
• Engagement-focused
• Self-aware

Here’s what I mean.

One of my goals for this year is to read ten books on employee engagement. In Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Truth About Employee Engagement, he writes about the three causes of job misery.

Job Misery

One of them is anonymity—the sense that at work,...

The other day I was coaching a supervisor whose team members weren’t as engaged as she wanted them to be. We talked about the reasons for that and brainstormed possible solutions. After coming up with five or six possibilities, she highlighted two that seemed doable for her, and decided to try them. I’m looking forward to hearing the results.

Myth: Sometimes supervisors get the idea that producing highly engaged employees is all their responsibility.

And so, they don’t want...

The business benefits of employee recognition are numerous. Studies published by Forbes and GetHppy show that employee recognition improves engagement, customer satisfaction, employee retention, employee experience, and performance.

Actually, “Praise and commendation from managers was rated the top motivator for performance, beating out other noncash and financial incentives, by 67% of workers,” according to GetHppy.com.

We can all agree that employee recognition is important....

I’m on a kick to read books on employee engagement. My reading list for the New Year is full of them. As the head of our company’s human resources function, my role is help drive employee engagement. The reason is simple—when employees are engaged, everyone wins.

So how do we drive engagement?

In his book, The Truth About Employee Engagement, Patrick Lencioni shares three causes of “job misery” (what a wonderful, yet terrible term). If you’ve ever been...

Last time we talked about the benefits of creating a role and outcome statement for employees. Now let's talk about how to do it. Only 60% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work, which leaves 40% guessing and the engagement level plummeting.

At my day job at EnergyCAP, Inc., we’ve created role and outcome statements for every employee, which are accessible to the entire company. Like I said, doing so has yielded big benefits for our employees,...

Note: A few months ago, a college ministry approached me for help. It wanted to inspire its people to pray more. This post is based on the advice I gave.

Let’s say you’re the director of prayer for a college ministry.

One of your goals is to motivate your people to pray more. But this isn’t easy. Everyone seems to be as busy as ever. They have endless choices for spending their time. And “praying more” doesn’t seem to be a pressing concern. To be...

As I shared in "Giving Employees A Home," only “6 in 10 U.S. employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work,” which drives disengagement in the American workforce (Gallup). Since clear expectations are critical for employees, our company has established a unique role and outcome statement for each position.

Everyone from the CEO to the newest employee can access each other’s role and outcome statements. Doing this was a big effort between employees...

I stepped into a Human Resources role at EnergyCAP, Inc. (ECI) in 2016. Since then, I’ve been interested in the subject of employee engagement. I’d read the statistics from Gallup that said only 33% of the American workforce was engaged, which meant 67% were in some way disengaged.

I wondered how our workplace would stack up to the rest of the country, so as a company we took Gallup’s Q12 engagement survey. The Q12 survey contains 12 questions, which Gallup has perfected...

Last week I taught a leadership workshop to Human Resources (HR) professionals on keys for boosting employee engagement. There were various organizations represented from landscaping to higher education to temp agencies to transportation, but despite their differences, one thing was the same—they all wanted to increase employee engagement.

Why would they want to do that? Because according to Glassdoor, organizations with engagement programs report 26% greater year-after-year revenue...