Every company is giving great importance to employee engagement in their organization. But there are a lot of myths around this subject. Apart from employing effective recruitment strategies, you must also keep an eye out for the following myths that could affect your company.
The Top 6 Employee Engagement Myths
1. Conducting Employee Engagement SurveyWill Create Engagement
An employee engagement survey gives you a measure of engagement. It will just tell you whether the staff is engaged or not. But it won’t help in making the employees more engaged.
Study the survey, understand what the employees want and identify areas of improvement. Make an action plan based on the findings. Only then you can create more engagement.
It will also show the employees that you are taking the survey seriously and are willing to make necessary changes in the organization and promote positive company culture.
2. Employee Engagement and Employee Satisfaction Are the Same
Employee engagement and employee satisfaction are not the same things. An employee can be satisfied but not engaged. If you provide good compensation to the employees for their services, they will be satisfied. But it is not necessary that they will enjoy coming to work each day.
Engaged employees, on the other hand, will be passionate about their work and will be extremely committed. They will invest themselves in the work. They will feel like a part of something bigger and ensure they contribute to the company through their work.
3. Employees Must be Professional, Not Emotional
Employees must be professional, but that doesn’t mean they should suppress their emotions. If you want your employees to be happy and engaged, you need to give them the freedom to emote and connect with their peers emotionally.
Most of our decisions and behaviors are driven by emotions. By expecting them to be unemotional, you may hinder with their decision-making skills in certain areas.
4. Engaged Employees Are Just a Minority
If the majority of your workforce was unhappy and disengaged, either their performance would be poor or they would look for a new job. It is a myth that a majority of employees hate their jobs, work against their wishes or due to pressure from employers.
According to research, almost 55 percent of employees either agree or strongly agree that they are happy with their current job. That is more than half your workforce and in no way a minority.
5. Managers Must be Given Incentives to Maintain High Engagement
It is true that managers are held accountable for how their team performs. But it would be wrong to give them any kind of incentive to maintain high engagement levels in the team.
If you incentivize the process, managers may make the employees say what the management wants to hear. Even the employees will hide what they actually would want to say due to the fear of being penalized by the managers.
In the end, you will spend a lot of money on the employee engagement surveys but it would be useless. Employees could give false answers just to satisfy their managers. Bringing money to increase engagement through managers is an extremely bad idea.
6. Unhappy Employees Would Be Poor at Customer Service
It would be wrong to say that disengaged and unhappy employees will allow their emotions to affect customer service. Even unhappy employees would have enough integrity to work professionally.
It is true that they might look for newer job opportunities, but they won’t bring the customer service down. In fact, they will serve their customers well.
It is easy to fall prey to several employee engagement myths. As long as you are aware of them, you can create a better and engaged workforce. This will reflect positively through happier employees, increased productivity and profits.
Author the Author
Kelly Barcelos
is a progressive digital marketing manager for Jobsoid – Applicant Tracking System. She is responsible for leading the content and social media teams at work. Her expertise and experience in the field of HR enable her to create value-driven content for her readers – both on Jobsoid’s blog and other guest blogs where she publishes content regularly.
