What’s the true measurement of leadership success? Is it being able to do a line item budget? Meeting deadlines? Resource management?

Really it’s none of those traits. The true measure of a successful leader is the satisfaction, engagement and productivity of our workforce. Giving the very best experience to our clients and customers comes from that effective workforce.

According to the Gallop Association, close to 70% of our workforce is disengaged or actively disengaged. So how realistic can it be to have an engaged workforce with such staggering numbers. We’ll be putting these questions to today’s guest.

With a dream to become the next Bill Gates, our guest started his first company when he was just 22 years old. Despite his hard work the company failed after just one year.

But after discovering the power of leadership and extreme productivity he went on to start, build and sell several multimillion dollar tech companies that have won both “Inc 500” awards for fast growth and “Best Place to Work” awards.

He is a New York Times bestselling author of six books including 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management and Employee Engagement 2.0. And his new podcast is the LEADx Show. Please welcome, Kevin Kruse.

In this week’s show:

* What is employee engagement?

* Getting buy-in from your organisation is about a sense of ownership

* What are the effects of low employee engagement?

* How do you identify a disengaged workforce?

* How do you ensure front-line managers have the time and resources to engage with their team and inspire employee engagement?

* Training our managers for a changing workforce

* How do you improve employee engagement?

Links:

* Society for Resource Management (SHRM)

* Survey Monkey employee engagment survey

* Kevin’s email: kevin [at] leadx [dot] org

* LEADx Podcast

What is employee engagement?

Part of the struggle with getting people to care about engagement is due to the fact that there are a lot of different definitions and confusion around the subject.

A lot of people think it’s about employee satisfaction, but actually, that is not enough. A satisfied employee is not the person that’s going to come to you with great ideas or give 100% at all times.

Other people believe it’s about employee happiness – creating an enjoyable environment with great perks. But you can be happy at work and not really be working on behalf of the organisation.

So Kevin defines employee engagement as the emotional commitment that employees have to an organisation and its goals. When you care about the organisation you work for, you are going to give discretionary effort. Employee engagement and discretionary effort are not one and the same, but employee engagement leads to discretionary effort.

Getting buy-in from your organisation is about a sense of ownership

It’s a fundamental thing to protect something that we feel a sense of ownership of. We don’t wash a rental car, we wash the car we own!

Giving the workforce a sense of ownership of the organisation, the projects and the work they are a part of encourages a level of engagement that automatically generates buy-in to new projects and ideas.

What are the effects of low employee engagement?

There is great research that shows a correlation between engagement or lack of engagement and all kinds of business measures.

In terms of quality, a disengaged worker is going to have more accidents. A disengaged sales person isn’t going to work as hard on a Friday afternoon as a Monday afternoon. Disengaged workers are less loyal, looking for other jobs and are likely to leave the organisation for a slight pay increa...