Whilst both employee satisfaction and engagement are crucial components of company culture, it is employee engagement that generally drives business performance in the long term.
So, what is the difference?
Employee satisfaction generally refers to employees’ contentment and happiness at work. This is driven by hygiene factors such as job security and working conditions, a safe environment, pay and benefits and satisfactory work-life integration. These should fulfil employees’ needs while influencing retention, as traditionally, satisfaction has usually been enough to retain employees. And the opposite is also true. If employees are discontented or feel that their needs are unmet, then they are more likely to look elsewhere. From either perspective, it’s clear that a stable workforce is usually beneficial to a company.
Employee engagement, however, is usually driven by the motivation factors of responsibility, recognition, and challenging work – both of which drive productivity and direct the extent to which people are personally involved in the success of an organisation.
It is true that personal involvement and identification with company values and mission gives people the desire for the company to succeed – thus motivating them to invest themselves more and strive to improve. Recent studies have shown that an engaged workforce is more likely to stay, to work harder, and to be pulling in the right direction. An engaged employee knows what their employer is trying to achieve and will be supporting and moving towards the same goals.
Though an employee could be happy at work (high employee satisfaction), they could also be disengaged – doing the minimum of actual work, chatting at every opportunity, and leaving promptly. For some people, this would be a satisfying work environment as they view their position only from their own perspective and how it affects them. These employees usually need additional motivation factors to engage them with more challenges, which of course may lead to recognition and responsibility – hopefully creating an upward spiral of engagement and improved productivity.
Clearly then, high satisfaction does not necessarily equate to high engagement or high performance. But likewise, an employee could be highly engaged yet not satisfied, if, for example, they were concerned about job security or uncompetitive pay.
However, satisfaction can more easily be improved with identifiable and improvable hygiene factors, (flexitime, pay rise, bonus etc.). Engagement, of course, depends upon what drives the motivation of each individual and is mainly influenced by managers who need to understand their employees enough to create optimum circumstances for optimum performance.
So, what specific motivation factors are realistically creatable in the workplace to make highly engaged and high performing organisations take employees beyond job satisfaction to engagement?
Firstly, a compelling strategic narrative that explains the business’ background, the vision for its future and the way in which an employee contributes to this increases an employee’s sense of attachment and belonging.
Secondly, training needs to be visible, approachable, and consistent, giving coaching and support that both stretches and empowers people.
An employee voice program enables employees to influence matters that affect them in the workplace through strong communication channels. Being part of the solution encourages improvement, innovation and ultimately, productivity.
Finally, integrity. Evidence suggests that high levels of integrity correlate with commercial success in terms of profitability, competitiveness, sales, growth, and morale. In practice, business integrity means meeting commitments, having a strong and consistent moral code that meets the expectation of your customer, and fundamental honesty.
It could be described as doing the right thing even when there’s no one there to see it.
And though most start-ups are small operations to begin with, the aim is for them to grow, so striving for a company culture that engenders staff engagement is worth it from the start.