By Cynthia Stotlar and Kristin Scott

If you own a company or manage people, you should know that only 17 percent of your staff and co-workers are fully engaged and energized.

What is an Engaged Employee?
Employees actively engaged in their work give their best to get the job done and enjoy what they do. Remember employee attitude surveys? Today, they are called "employee engagement" surveys. And even if you only have one employee, you need to find out how that employee feels about the job and your organization.

Conducting an employee engagement survey is the first step in finding out what employees think. Doing something about their ideas is the second step-and a crucial one. According to a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, the success of employee engagement surveys lies in implementing ideas resulting from asking employees questions.

Why Does Having Engaged Employees Matter?
Having engaged employees equals happy customers and more profit. Statistical data proves that efforts to engage employees are worth it. Gallup found 38 percent higher customer satisfaction scores, 22 percent higher productivity and 27 percent higher profits in a survey on the Impact of HR Practices on Employee Attitudes and Employee Outcomes.

What Does This Mean to You?
You have room for improvements if the work is just barely getting accomplished, if the organization should be more profitable, if the organization's customer service could be better, and if your employees come to work most days, but use every sick day they accrue.
Statistical data gathered by Towers Perrin shows:

• 17 percent of employees are fully engaged and energized.
• 64 percent are just doing what it takes to get by.
• 10 percent are bitter, turned off or "retired" but forgot to leave.
  

Applying the above statistics to a company of 50 employees, means that nine employees are excited about being at work and giving their all each day. Another 32 come to work and do just enough to keep their job, and five are actually reporting to work but spoiling the environment with negative comments and poor attitudes while their co-workers pick up the slack.

Why Do Employees Stay or Leave?
Research shows the top reasons employees stay at a job:

• Exciting work and challenge
• Career growth
• Learning and development
• Good boss
• Meaningful work
• Making a difference
  
• Pride in the organization
  
• Mission and product
  
• Great work environment and culture

This assumes you are paying comparable wages and have a decent benefits plan. According to the Hay Group, the top reasons employees leave are a bad boss, lack of respect for ideas and feeling unappreciated. So employees join and stay with the organization, but leave the boss.

So, What Can You Do to Engage Your Employees?
The first step to engaging your employees is through communication. They need to know you care. Show them they are the heart of the organization. You can do that by supporting employees' pride and ownership of their work. Let them sign their work, give everyone business cards, let employees choose their own job titles, allow employees to distribute work among themselves for ownership and educate employees on specifically how their job impacts the company's bottom line. Share financials with employees to give them a sense of openness, trust and honesty.

Employees want an opportunity to grow and develop, so provide challenging work. Implement career ladders for employees in frontline positions so they can see growth opportunities. Rotate employees through various areas to cross-train and avoid stagnation. If employees are allowed to become stagnant doing the same tasks day in and day out, they will go on autopilot and creativity is lost.

Promote the Right Boss
The future of your organization is dependent on those that work for you today. If employees join the organization, but leave because of bad bosses, you need to invest in management.

Just because someone has superior job skills, doesn't mean he/she is right for management or supervisory jobs. Don't promote people to supervisor or manager without assessing whether they have the skill set needed to manage people. People skills are entirely different than mechanical skills or engineering skills or nursing skills. So before you promote someone, consider if he or she has people skills. Then, invest time in mentoring that person and provide leadership development programs to build a solid foundation.

The Department of Labor projects a labor shortage of more than 10 million workers in five years, so employers would be wise to start energizing existing employees to retain them for the future. Remember, Gallup found that energized employees equate to a 38 percent higher customer satisfaction scores, 22 percent higher productivity and 27 percent higher profits.

Cynthia Stotlar, M.Ed., SPHR and Kristin Scott, M.S.M., PHR are human resources consultants with Creative Business Solutions (www.CBSKS.com), which develops and presents customized training programs, assessment tools for selection and training, HR and IT Consulting services, HRIS systems, 360's and more. You can reach them at (800) 785-2310.