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Realities of
Employee
Engagement

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3 out of every 4 of your employees are not fully engaged
while they are working for you.
You are the last person they are going to discuss it with.

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Legal
Exposure
Process
Control
Staffing Succession
Planning
What Woke You Up This Morning?
Expense
Reduction
Safety
Absenteeism
Revenue
Targets
Operational
Targets
Presenteeism
Profitability
Quality
Issues
Customer
Retention
Waste
Productivity
Board/
Investor
Expectations
Customer
Service
Employee engagement is crucial for ALL of these

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This eBook Will Cover:
● Rethinking Employee Engagement
● The Problem
● Human Capital
● A Model for How To Think About Your Employees
● Characteristics of An Engaged Employee
● The 13 Realities of Employee Engagement
● Top 10 Ideas for Improving Employee Engagement
● Questions For Your Organization
● Measuring Progress
● Summary
● About the Author

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Rethinking Employee Engagement
Perhaps you’ve heard the words employee engagement in the past.
You may have even had conversations about engagement. If you are like most,
engagement gets pushed out of your mind by other more immediate needs.
This is the case for most organizational leaders. Engagement all by itself is not a
problem we business leaders are actively trying to solve. Sure, it is important, but we
are busy focusing on the more tangible challenges in our businesses.
A new way to think about engagement is to understand employee engagement’s role
in the challenges your business is facing today.
While you may not be focused on engagement. You are, however, spending
most of your time and energy solving specific problems and improving your
business.
But here’s the thing...employee engagement has a dramatic effect on every
business challenge we face.

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The Problem
Without effective engagement efforts, organizations are
plagued with inefficiencies, mediocrity, waste, increased
expense, malicious obedience and existential risk.
Higher engagement leads to decreased absenteeism,
decreased presenteeism, increased motivation, increased
attention and increased focus. All of this drives increased
productivity.

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Human Capital
Human Capital is simply an idea based on the concept that
not all employees are considered equal. The quality of employees
and their contribution is modifiable through investment, education
and experience.
Additionally, growing discussion is taking place on the topics of
resilience, energy, emotional intelligence and other capabilities.
Attention is growing in the area of understanding employee’s needs
and helping them be more productive.
Unfortunately, the tendency is toward a “one size fits all” industrial
approach that has a very real risk of further disengaging employees.
Humans are complex. They are constantly evolving in response to the
environments in which they operate.
We must incorporate the individual’s specific context if we are to make
any progress toward a more engaged employee.

A Model for How to Think About Your Employees
Individual
Security
Risk
Tolerance
Skills
Training
Resilience
Cognitive
Capability
Cultural
Adaptation
Tolerance
for Change
Ability
to be
Present
Emotional
Intelligence
Physical
State
Personal Drivers of Engagement
Perceived
Value
Personal
Vision
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Characteristics of an Engaged Employee
We see it all the time. An effective team working for the good of the team
outperforms a team of highly skilled individual performers. The same thing
goes for companies. An engaged team will outperform a team where
members are less than enthused about their relationship with their
employer. But how do you define an engaged employee?
An engaged employee generally exhibits these behaviors:
• Brings the best effort they have most days
• Exhibits a high level of focus
• Demonstrates a positive emotional connection to the work they do
• Possesses a positive emotional connection to their employer
• Puts forth an effort beyond the minimum level required to maintain
employment
• Offers thoughts, ideas and solutions
• Contributes to conversations
• Asks questions
• Articulates what they are doing and why in a positive manner
• Maintains a posture of wanting to go to work vs. having to go to work
• Picks up the ball, identifying the next action and following up
• Treats their co-workers with trust and respect

BUILD A
TRUSTING
RELATIONSHIP
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The 13 Realities of Employee Engagement
There are 13 realities that employers must understand before they can
improve employee engagement. In order to be effective, any
employee engagement initiative must take all of these realities into
account.
1. The engagement must be within the individual’s context in order to
be relevant and effective. Attending off-site meetings and
conferences are usually nice, but cannot offer real change to the
individual because they do not offer individually customized coaching,
training and mentoring.
2. The engagement must be individually created and individually
customized to each person based upon specific needs. You must
address needs at the individual “fingerprint” level. Each person
needs an ongoing and individually tailored approach.

6. Engagement must be offered with service to
the individual as the top priority. Typical
interventions are focused on the business and
based upon what is easiest and most realistic to
offer. For example, gathering everyone together
on one day to talk about stress management
techniques is about the company and not Joe
Smith in row 3 seat 5. These kind of “easy” efforts
actually create a false sense of progress. They
also damage management’s credibility.
7. Employee engagement cannot be measured
in the typical ways. A report showing utilization or
other activity data doesn’t mean engagement is
being affected. Engagement efforts do not fit into
neat report formats.
8. Engagement is a process. A belief. A part of
“who we are”. It is not precise. It is not a single
event.
9. Engagement efforts need to be ongoing. They
must happen In the background. They must also
be constant and consistent.
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3. Management is typically too busy and not able to
provide what is needed for engagement. They are
often not comfortable with the right conversations that
can lead to improved engagement. These
conversations typically need to expand beyond the
boss-employee relationship. Credibility is often lost
with distracted attempts by management. Most
managers are not trained to have these
conversations. Think back in your own case...what
was the reason you were promoted? It wasn’t
because you were a great mentor. Also, did you ever
receive any real training in the area of employee
training and coaching?
4. Focus on effectiveness over easy and efficient.
Employee engagement is not about having access to
information, it is not about web sites, software or
apps. If this were the case, we would not have a
massive engagement problem.
5. Conversations must be confidential and secure.
Employees must be free of fear. They must be sure
there will be no negative consequences as a result of
working on their engagement. They must be able to
be vulnerable and completely honest.

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10. The individual is a complex being. They are much more than an
employee. They are certainly NOT “Human Capital”. The entire person
must be addressed. Engagement efforts must take into account all of
the factors that impact engagement. Some of these include:
• Skill gaps
• Attitude
• Motivation
• Inner voice
• Emotional resilience
• Physical health
• Emotional health
• Organizational skills and techniques
• Written and oral communications
• Critical thinking
• Collaboration
• Self awareness
• Problem solving
• Positive and negative events in their life

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11. Outsiders must do the intervention work. Employees trust outsiders
more than they do the people they work for. Complete honesty is easier to
achieve between an employee and a trained professional from the outside.
This person is also better able to have a wide range of meaningful
conversations (business, personal, other).
12. Engagement efforts must be able to work as a stand-alone offering
or in support of other initiatives. An engagement effort is not
necessarily a replacement for other initiatives. It can an enabler of them.
However, engagement efforts need to be effective even when there are no
other major initiatives underway.
13. Measuring engagement using surveys should be stopped until the
strategic leadership of the organization is truly ready to think differently
about employee engagement. Ongoing measurements without effective
changes only serve to reduce the credibility of the strategic leadership.
Measuring via surveys does nothing to promote engagement. It is not a
value added activity.

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Top 10 Ideas For Improving Employee Engagement
1. Make employee engagement part of how your business operates and part
of who you are.
2. Commit to an ongoing engagement process, not one-time events.
3. Use an external resource to make sure the engagement work is getting
done in the background. This work is the first to get delayed or dismissed
when you get busy.
4. Support and maintain complete confidentiality.
5. When engaging with employees, consider the whole person. Do not just
focus on what you need from them today at this moment.
6. Make engagement efforts about the employee, not about the company.
7. Deliver any engagement efforts only within the individual’s specific
context.
8. Use a ‘low-tech” approach. Engagement is about meaningful
conversations. It is not about web sites, apps and software.
9. Make sure what you do and what you offer is completely tailored to each
individual person. Do not attempt any “one size fits all” approaches
simply because they are easier.
10. Be completely honest and transparent with any engagement efforts you
undertake.

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Questions for Your Organization
• How do we define employee engagement?
• Is employee engagement something we care about? How do we know?
• What current business challenges would be helped with higher employee
engagement?
• Are we able to improve employee engagement on our own? Why or why
not? How? Why haven’t we done this before?
• Do we understand what an engaged employee looks like in our
environment?
• Are we able to identify examples of people who are engaged?
• Do we understand what a disengaged employee looks like in our
environment?
• Are we able to identify examples of people who are disengaged?
• Are we satisfied with the previous and current investments we’ve made in
our employee’s engagement, performance and productivity. Specifically,
what are those investments?
• Do we really know what our employees and managers think about our
company? How do we know?

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Measuring Progress
Engagement is measured by observation at the individual level
through examples and stories. Employee engagement is what we
see and hear in hallways, meetings, on the shop floor and
everywhere else your business operates. It is measured in customer
feedback. It is also measured by direct employee feedback.
Because employee engagement is an ongoing process and part of
how an organization operates, it is everywhere. It can be seen and
felt.
Effective employee engagement strategies do work. At first, they can
be slow. However, within a relatively short amount of time, more and
more examples of higher employee engagement are easier to
highlight. The catalog of these examples continues to grow and
engagement becomes a part of the new normal.
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Summary
From the very small to the very large organization, strategic leaders everywhere need to decide for
themselves whether or not to address the engagement level of the employees and managers that
make up their organization.
If they decide that they will meet the challenge of employee engagement, they must have an effective
and realistic approach. Having an effective engagement program is critical to the success of the
organization and the strategic leaders that run them.
With an effective properly crafted engagement program, strategic leaders and the people that work for
them will benefit from a more productive and higher functioning organization. They will also have a
clear strategic competitive advantage.
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About the Author
Don Turner
Don is an energetic and seasoned business leader with a background of growth and
success. He has been successful in management, operations, sales and service roles. He
has also had success in multiple industries and business models. He is a builder and cares
deeply about the organizations and the people he works with.
Contact Don at 734-812-2602 or
dturnerlwp@gmail.com
www.longwalkpartners.com
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Realities of
Employee
Engagement