With so many organizations changing the way they do business in light of the pandemic, it has inevitably impacted their employees as well. Many employees are working longer hours from home. Others are on the front line working in our hospitals, restaurants, and retail businesses. The worldwide pandemic otherwise known as Covid-19 or the coronavirus has unequivocally turned upside down the way we live our lives in so many ways. From the way we work to the way we have fun, life is no longer the same since the coronavirus outbreak.
It makes you wonder, how do employees stay engaged with everything going on? A mere cursory look at the statistics tells a bleak story even before the pandemic. According to Gallup, only 35 to 36% of people reported being engaged with their work. These numbers have only gone up slightly since the onset of the pandemic.
However, before we delve too deeply into this topic, let us step back and define what exactly is workplace engagement first.
Work engagement, unlike it antithesis burnout, has been defined as an active, positive work-related state that is characterized by three dimensions, vigor, dedication, and absorption.
Vigor refers to high levels of energy and mental resilience while working.
Dedication refers to being strongly involved in one’s work and experiencing a sense of significance, enthusiasm, and challenge.
Absorption is marked by being completely focused and happily engrossed in work to the point that time passes quickly.
In other words, engaged employees work hard (vigor) are involved (dedicated) and feel happily engrossed (involved) in their work. Indeed, can you imagine going to work feeling both dedicated and involved rather than simply feeling as though you are going through the motions, collecting a paycheck? I CAN. That’s why I am fascinated with workplace engagement research and practice.
Well, now that we have gotten the preliminaries out of the way and have clearly defined what work engagement is, it therefore becomes imperative to now determine the key factors in promoting this state of being in your organizational personnel. Below the reader will find key drivers of workplace engagement:
Driver#1- Developing Social Support
Here the question becomes: Does your organization adequately design its work in such a way that incorporates and encourages opportunities for social support? This is a key question to address as research indicates that job resources such as social support can help to reduce job demands and the associated physiological and psychological costs. It can also stimulate personal growth, learning and development. Social support becomes particularly important or relevant in work environments where workers are confronted with high job demands (e.g. workload, unfavorable physical environment). In these settings, the need to belong becomes ever more important for your staff. Social support aids to this end. Social support from one’s supervisor and one’s co-workers has also been found to be important for engagement. One way to demonstrate social support within your organization is to have supervisors include their subordinates in the decision making process and provide them with positive performance feedback to help them grow and develop within the organization.
Driver#2- Self-efficacy
Workplace Engagement has been found to be correlated with self-efficacy or the belief that one is able to meet the demands they face in a vast array of settings. If you are recruiting individuals that demonstrate self-efficacy, you will find that this personality characteristic or personal resource predicts one’s work engagement as self-efficacious individuals are less likely to view work demands as out of control or unmanageable. Self-efficacy has also been found to be positively related to engagement as it leads to a greater willingness to invest additional energy and effort when finishing a task or project. It has also been found that self-efficacy and work engagement are important for job satisfaction. Self-efficacious individuals adopt stronger beliefs in their capacity to successfully perform work tasks. They are also more likely to establish more challenging goals for themselves, invest more, persist longer and are better in dealing with failing experiences than persons low in self-efficacy. All of these personal attributes are attractive to an organization that seeks to maintain a competitive advantage in the labor marketplace.
Driver#3- Performance feedback
Providing positive performance feedback is also important as it is likely to increase engagement and performance as it encourages employee learning, which can increase one’s sense of job competence. Feeling competent in one’s work is important in that it it can also influence employees to be less inclined to leave their current organization reducing the voluntary turnover rate. Receiving performance feedback shows your staff that the organization is committed or invested in their growth and development. Demonstrating commitment in your employees can likewise influence your staff to be committed to the organization. Therefore, it becomes imperative for organizations to make providing performance feedback to its staff a priority. This can be done by incorporating providing performance feedback into job descriptions of key supervisory or management staff. Once this is incorporated into job descriptions, it will become an integral part of the performance appraisal process whereby supervisory staff will now get rated in part for the amount and level of performance feedback they are providing to their direct reports. In this way, providing performance feedback will not simply be an optional afterthought, but a cornerstone of how one’s job performance is evaluated.
For more information on workplace engagement, please see the hyperlinks below:
Workplace Psych Blog 
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