Moving It and Employee Engagement

July 15, 2015

Let’s begin with the story of * Moving It…*

It all started with a few folks at Multunus trying to bring in a sense of oneness in the organization. They began an experiment by starting a health movement. They would post their exercise details on WhatsApp group and celebrate their workout wins during standups. This inspired a few others to join the movement.

We started tracking everyone’s workout on a spreadsheet, initially. Then we quickly built an app called MoveIt, which helped us keep track efficiently. As we were hoping, we saw a spike in the engagement on the app.

We were enthusiastic about building features of the app while we saw people talking about it over lunch and coffee. But then, we realized that we were just touching the tip of the iceberg which was trying to bring in camaraderie. Beneath this lay a huge part of the iceberg, a huge problem which was trying to be solved by many companies called "Employee Engagement".

Hence we thought, why not solve this problem from its root at the organization. Before that, we wanted to first understand what and why behind Employee Engagement.

What is Employee Engagement?

Initial thought would be, having fancy parties, unlimited junk food to snack on and other “cool” stuff in the workplace will increase employee engagement and happiness. In this case, one has failed to understand what employee engagement actually means.

After a lot of reading, we discovered that each organization had its own definition for Employee Engagement. But, this is what it means to us:

Employee engagement is what happens when an employee’s objectives are in resonance with the organization’s objectives.

This happens because the organization gives her a feeling that she is part of something that is bigger than her. As an effect, she is in a state of flow in all the activities she performs.

State of Flow is the state of mind when a person is completely immersed in the activity she is performing. She feels that her body and mind are working in such symphony that she needn’t put in any kind of effort. She is energized, rather than being drained.

Why is Engagement Important?

There are two ways in which a company can grow:

1. Bring in more people to increase total value

2. Each employee brings in more value

Now let’s take each of the above mentioned categories and see how Employee Engagement affects them:

Bring in more people to increase total value:

If more people are employed then more value is created. Now, this simple "if then" equation isn't so simple in reality. We all know how difficult it is to hire folks who are good fits for the organization and the amount of time and money being invested in this process of hiring is huge.

Engaged employees know very well what kind of people we are looking at to hire. They help us by directing us to people who match our expectations. They also brand and promote the organization without anyone prompting them, attracting the right kind of people who are good fits. Hence, employee engagement increases the total value.

• As we say at Multunus, the opposite of an employee leaving is the employee bring in another employee.*

Each employee brings in more value:

We want the employees to bring in more value to the table. If the employee is engaged, then her objectives and goals will be working towards the organizational success.

An engaged employee will showcase the following:

• Attitude: that tells she is proud and loyal towards the organization;

• Behavior: she becomes a great advocate of the organization to clients, or goes the extra mile to finish a piece of work;

• Outcomes: may include lower accident rates, higher productivity, happiness at work, fewer conflicts, more innovation, lower numbers leaving and reduced sickness rates.

We need to understand how one can measure Employee Engagement. I will be talking about this in the next post.