What defines an engaged employee, is it hard work, is it extra hours, is it creating huge value for your organisation?
Let’s start with clearing up what engagement is not:
Its not someone who works hard, year in, year out? although that’s one component of course but its not the full story.
Its too simplified and its not going to cut it when your thinking of high performance and an owner mentality.
Let me bring you into the world of the owner and how we think: Sure, we are not 24/7 always on business machines but our life is not far off, the intellectual stimulation and the challenge of business alights our passion and soul and drives us to continually want to do a better job, earn more, make our business more productive, contribute more and create a difference in the world.
We believe business holds an almost spiritual position in the world, requiring a lifelong, never give up mentality that most people frankly couldn’t handle.
Now of course there will be some people that can have that level of engagement when they are employees but there wont be many.
Let’s take the passion driven owner persona at one end of the extreme and an actively disengaged at the other, I would say that an engaged employee is somewhere about 7 to 8 (10 being the owner persona and 1 being the actively disengaged employee)
Back to the definition:
An engaged employee is:
Someone actively and emotionally connected to the companies goals and mission naturally giving more than is expected from him/her.
So that covers the definition of engagement.
Now onto the twist – wellness.
Well-what you say!
Yes, wellness, isn’t wellness completely intertwined with engagement.
Think about it, according to the Excite Institute the key elements that an engaged employee experiences are:
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A sense of community
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Meaning (belief that they are doing something good)
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Autonomy (being trusted to work on ones own without a watchful eye)
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Rewards
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Recognition
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Care (employees need to feel cared for by their employers)
So there you go the definition of engagement and the key elements boiled down for you here right now.
What’s the wellness twist? We are going to go into this in more detail in later articles but let me give you a concrete overview now:
- Maybe the most important part of engagement – employees feeling cared for by their employers:
Wellness is all over this, when your helping people make considerable, often life changing results in their quality of life of course they are going to feel more cared for. In fact, when a wellness program is run by true professionals and the program structure and information that is delivered is world class the results can be spectacular.
When the results are spectacular, and your team transform their lives, they will love you for it.
- Autonomy:
A wellness program should always be delivered to voluntary participants and they are guided and coached but never bribed or coerced into making any changes, they are trusted to do as much or as little as they want to do – another example of autonomy in your company.
- Meaning:
A great wellness program will be on a mission from even before the kick-off event, the heartfelt message is that this wellness program is in fact a mission to help them and their family do more, be more and experience more joy out of life.
Throughout the program (if it’s a great one) the message is that improving their lives will have a significant, positive impact on the community from them being healthier and having more energy, basically the foundation of success is huge, a key point is that these days people’s sphere of influence is every increasing due to social media and its impact.
- Rewards:
On a world class wellness program there are intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of unlimited magnitude, the reward of going from ‘feeling terrible’ to ‘feeling on top of the world’ what better reward could there be.
On top of that there is often an incentive plan in place where companies have the chance to give some amazing prizes to participants.
- Recognition:
Along every step of the wellness program journey recognition is pre-programmed into the very nature of a world class corporate wellness program.
If its one to one with a health coach with them for the whole journey to recognise their great attitude of fantastic results or hard work or even if its an app that recognises their contribution to the program, their team and their future recognition is built into a great program.
- A sense of Community:
This is one area where a wellness program is especially successful.
People are on a journey of bettering themselves and their company and working toward their own goals but also team goals.
Along the way their quality of life gets better and better and the feeling of euphoria goes up and up, it’s a very exciting and uplifting thing to behold, don’t believe me? Well you haven’t been part of a truly great wellness program.
When people are taking part in a steps challenge for example in teams then each person has an incentive to do well – internally and externally and great efforts are rewarded. In situations like this people start talking, setting up private Whatsapp groups to get people stepping and the sense of community is fantastic.
So there you go, the definition of engagement and a wellness twist, I hope you liked the article.
Give me a thumbs up or thumbs down in the comments section and let me know what you thought. Thanks,
Tim
www.corporatewellnessdubai.com
052 699 3955
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