From Employee Engagement to Employee Satisfaction

Author: Antony Xavier

Our Most Valuable assets are our people.

“There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it.” – Jack Welch, former CEO of GE

It is often misunderstood that Employee Engagement is only Birthday Celebrations, Get-together, Dining and Festival Celebrations. Though these Employee Engagement activities make the employee happy does it mean they are satisfied with their Job? Most of the time you will find the answer is “NO”. We still have the same issues like attrition, low productivity and less Customer Satisfaction.

So what actually drives Employee Engagement, the drivers of employee engagement are Growth, Trust, Communication, and Reward & Recognition.

Most of the research on Employee satisfaction shows that simply by recognizing and rewarding employees for their work, you can drive emotional commitment to your organization which results in better employee engagement, increased productivity, less attrition, committed employees and increased customer satisfaction.

When you decide to develop a reward & recognition program, you need to develop one that is equally powerful for both the organization and the employee that creates a win-win situation. The Objective of any employee R&R program should be to attract and retain the best of the employees.

An Effective Reward & Recognition program should be in such a way that the employee contribution is assessed through the following behaviors:

♦ Displaying and practicing attitudes and behavior specific to the company

♦ Excellence in their day-to-day tasks

When designing a ACE Award (Awarding Contribution of Employees), the Reward & Recognition Program the following should be considered:

♦ Award Category

♦ Criteria

♦ Selection Process: The process should be transparent and not to be viewed as “Favoritism”

♦ Frequency

♦ Reward

Recognition categories:

♦ Good Mentor

♦ Going the Extra Mile - Putting that extra effort.

♦ Succeeding as a team

♦ Living the values in day - to - day roles

♦ Performance

♦ Employee Referral

The following are the benefits of well-designed employee Reward & Recognition program:

♦ It encourages the right behavior, boost the performance, focus employees on the right tasks and provide a clear sense of direction

♦ Improve morale, engagement and result in more satisfied and committed employees

♦ To attract and retain high performing employees and provide encouragement for low performers to become high performers

♦ Reward for cross-function / organizational performance can create more co-operations, more synergy and improvements in cutting across departmental barriers

If you are a leader, you can raise morale and create loyalty, work satisfaction and motivation when you express appreciation to others for their efforts. Let your people know that you really “CARE”.

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