How To Drive Employee Engagement At Work

Most organizations want their employees engaged in their work. Though, how they go about it leaves a lot of room for improvement. Engaged employees are fully absorbed and enthusiastic about their work and as a result create more value for their terms and the whole company.

At the same time, in the more than 30 years since leaders have been focused on employee engagement, not all that much has changed in most organizations. Every year brings a new report on the state of employee engagement across all industries and countries. And every year the number stays basically flat. Worldwide, only around 20 percent of employees report being fully engaged in their jobs. In the United States, it’s a slightly better 30 percent.

And perhaps one of the reasons employee engagement has stayed so low is that organizations are approaching employee engagement all wrong. Most organizations attempt to boost their engagement numbers by focusing on perks, benefits, or other elements of the experience of being at the office. But employees usually don’t take a terrible job and try to make it more tolerable by adding perks.

Just because you have a foosball table at the office doesn’t mean you’re an engaging workplace.

Instead, employees engage in a process first discovered by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton called job…