Get ‘Em Onboard: Engage Employees by Being Real

Sherri Petro, President and Chief Strategy Officer of VPI Strategies, represents VPI Strategies on the Expert Panel for Managing Americans. ManagingAmericans.com is a management blog with more than 3000,000 monthly readers. Sherri contributes monthly to the Workplace Communication Skills Blog and is one of the most highly read columnists.

engage employees

Here is a preview of September’s article:

Much is being bandied about on how to best engage employees. We have employers who want engaged employees and employees who want to be engaged. From the employer side, research shows us engaged employees lead to better results. Kenexa reports that engaged companies have five times higher shareholder returns over five years. From the employee side, one of the many insights in a Towers Perrin 2009 report is that employees want to give more.

Okay, then. We have both sides wanting the same thing – engagement. But Gallup continues to report in their annual survey that we have a problem. In 2012, only 30% of employees were engaged, 52% were disengaged and 18% were actively disengaged. And Gallup estimates that the latter category costs the U.S. $450 billion to $550 billion in lost productivity per year. Ouch!

How are we so badly missing the boat? Maybe it’s because we are keeping it docked in the kiddie pool instead of the big ocean. Our communication strategies onboarding people to new ideas and changing conditions need a serious overhaul.

Read the full article here.

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