Discretionary Effort And Employee Engagement

Employee engagement doesn t mean employee satisfaction.

Discretionary effort and employee engagement.

The greatest company success stories can be traced to employees who went above and beyond at work to fine tune the final product to reimagine the marketing strategy to make one more cold call. Many organizations manage performance in such a way that motivates employees to do only enough to get by and avoid getting in trouble negative reinforcement. It s not easy but it s not highly complicated either. The most common phrase or concept you ll hear when you start looking for definitions of engagement is discretionary effort a definition of engagement might suggest that the degree to which an employee is engaged is proportional to the amount of discretionary effort they put forth in their job.

What is employee engagement. But does this argument hold true. Often discretionary effort is associated with engagement as a byproduct of sorts the more engaged you are the more effort you ll put forth in your job. Employee engagement employee motivation discretionary effort can make the difference between a great team and an extraordinary team but what does it take to inspire and support that effort.

What employee engagement is not. In a leader s desire for encouraging employee engagement inspiring discretionary effort is the crown jewel. Every interaction with an employee has the potential to influence his or her engagement and inspire discretionary effort. This describes an internal state of being but one which relates closely to behaviour such as discretionary effort.

We ve heard a lot of definitions for employee engagement but most share something in common whether implicit or explicit. Custominsight provides strategies on how to improve engagement and why it is important. Many companies have employee satisfaction surveys and executives talk about employee satisfaction but the bar is set too low. Employee engagement cannot be achieved by a mechanistic approach which tries to extract discretionary effort by manipulating employees commitment and emotions.

Employees see through such attempts very quickly and can become cynical and disillusioned. Understand the fundamentals of employee engagement the trends shaping it and how to build an engaged workforce. How leaders manage their employees can substantially affect engagement. Employee engagement surveys help gauge employee performance the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs are committed to the organization and put discretionary effort into their work.