The Link Between Employee Engagement and Performance
Performance management and employee engagement are often treated as two siloed HR practices. Understandable as they feel like almost polar opposites, particularly if you have a traditional mindset. But highly engaged employees consistently outperform their lesser engaged colleagues in all measures, including productivity. So the link between employee engagement and performance is worth a close look.
Employee engagement affects just about every aspect of your organization: profitability, revenue, customer experience, employee turnover, and well-being. It creates better processes and enables better management, so your people are happier and more productive. This leads to better morale, more satisfied customers, higher quality products, less employee turnover, and higher profits for organizations.
When Gallup researchers analyzed the differences in performance among business work units, the benefits of employee engagement were clear. When comparing employee engagement levels, Gallup found that top- and bottom-quartile business units and teams had the following differences in business outcomes:
- 81% in absenteeism
- 58% in patient safety incidents (mortality and falls)
- 18% in turnover for high-turnover organizations
- 43% in turnover for low-turnover organizations
- 28% in shrinkage (theft)
- 64% in safety incidents (accidents)
- 41% in quality (defects)
- 10% in customer loyalty/engagement
- 18% in productivity (sales)
- 23% in profitability
But the question is, how can you engage employees? Importantly, how can you engage employees from afar in remote or hybrid workplaces?
Well, the answer is inclusive leadership. It is a collaborative and problem-solving leadership style that focuses on individual employees’ needs.
How Inclusive Leaders Elevate Employee Engagement and Performance
Inclusive leadership is a progressive leadership style in which leaders coordinate and communicate with their team members to make decisions and solve business problems. Inclusive leaders use their entire team’s knowledge and experience to make decisions for their business. These leaders are confident and competent, but they are not egoistic.
When leaders include their team in the decision-making process, it helps to improve engagement, performance, and retention rates in the organization. Employees will feel like their opinions matter to their leaders. This will motivate them to provide better suggestions and ideas to gain their leaders’ respect.
Trust is a critical ingredient of psychological safety, so leaders must be able to ‘talk the talk’ and ‘walk the walk’. Otherwise, their team will see straight through them, and subsequent actions are seen as performative. The collateral damage of this can be far-reaching.
Imagine how refreshing it feels when you find a leader who does what they say and means it. The benefits don’t just stop at it feeling refreshing. They do wonders for overall employee well-being and engagement. People feel safe to push their levels of innovation, the discretionary effort will increase, and people are far more likely to discuss their well-being when they feel connected to their leaders.
Wondering how you become a more inclusive leader? Author Gena Cox, PhD. provides great advice in her book, Leading Inclusion: Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel and I highly recommend checking it out. Meanwhile, here are some tips to help you get started:
- Adopt an open mind about what is possible. Shifting a “this is the way we’ve always done it” attitude to consider how to do things better can yield tremendous results.
- Take a proactive approach instead of avoiding inclusion issues, which individuals can interpret as disrespect.
- Be honest about what you do and don’t know. A willingness to learn more about what people are experiencing will help you gain a broader perspective.
- Every person, manager, and leader can make a difference in the one-on-one interactions you have with people. “I call this the three C’s – curiosity, connection, and comfort,” said Cox. “If you wake up in the morning determined to contribute to something that will help you understand and feel more connected with another person, all of a sudden it seems doable.”
Final Thoughts
Now that you know inclusive leadership is helpful in boosting employee engagement and performance, the next step is to understand how to develop inclusive leaders in your workplace. Inclusive leadership is based on clear communication and a plan of action. Therefore, if you want to implement an inclusive leadership style in your organization, work on developing inclusive traits among your employees. For everything you need to know, check out Inclusive Leaders Group’s complimentary Customized Inclusive Leadership Development Guide.
Ready to get started? Contact Inclusive Leaders Group today!
Sources
Customized Inclusive Leadership Development, by Charlotte Hughes, Inclusive Leaders Group
The Six Signature Traits of Inclusive Leadership, Deloitte University Press
Leading Inclusion: Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel, by Gena Cox
