The Importance of Employee Engagement: Why it REALLY matters

You know that people matter. Any business leader knows that.

Unfortunately the pressure to constantly improve performance and deliver better results makes this one of the first things that many – perhaps even the majority – of business leaders forget. You see, while you know the importance of people at an instinctive, intellectual and intuitive level, it is not something you consciously think about. And there is very little to reinforce the concept or that compels you to think about it. So when the pressure is on, you make people secondary.

That is why I find the diagram below so useful – and you will too.

It illumines the connection between tactics and strategy and highlights the fact that the further into the future you project the greater will be your degree of uncertainty. Strategy is effectively your vision of the future you desire while tactics are the steps you need to take to achieve that vision. Thus the route you take will only ever be a straight line if you control every possible eventuality that will shape the success of your strategy. However, you can never control or unilaterally manage events, circumstances or situations. Consequently, the further into the future you project the less control you have and the more susceptible you are to these external factors. So the more variables there are, the more options you have. And the more options, the more your responses are likely to vary. Thus the greater your uncertainty will be, and the greater the risk that your strategy may not succeed.

Of course you cannot deliver a strategy entirely on your own. In fact you cannot even deliver the tactics on your own. And the larger your organisation the more people you will need to execute your tactics and thus the more people you depend on to realise your strategy.  So you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to recognise that the more your people understand, agree with and are committed to your strategy, the more likely they are to act appropriately when unforeseen events happen and thus the more likely you are to succeed in your strategy.

With this clear image you can now understand why employee engagement is so important. Employee engagement delivers people who understand, agree with and commit to your strategy. It is the envelope that embeds your strategy throughout your organisation. Employee engagement ensures you almost invariably adopt the right tactics to deliver the shared vision that your strategy needs to be. Thus it is imperative that you embed it into your organisational DNA.

Hopefully you can now better understand why – in a world of incessant and rapid change - you need to make employee engagement your number one priority. Your tactics, strategy and ultimate success depend on it.