Predictive Index describes employee engagement to be “when employees have deep emotional commitments to both the company and its goals.”
Lovely, right? But how do we actually make that happen?
It’s found by evoking feeling. Yes, the thing we’ve all been taught to check at the door when going to work.
Psychological ownership is about developing emotional connections between the employee and the company’s mission, vision, strategy, team, and customers. When that happens, something beautiful emerges called discretionary effort.
Discretionary effort occurs when an employee goes beyond their own personal gain so the company benefits. Highly engaged employees often put in the extra effort to make the team succeed. They might choose to stay late to make a project perfect, can be found taking psychological risks in team meetings, and often are taking the time to strengthen their relationship with other team members reinforcing a strong company culture.
Photo from Predictive Index’s Decoding Employee Engagement downloadable ebook.
Disengaged employees do the opposite. They put in the bare minimum, can be heard using the phrase “that’s not part of my job!”, and become silent when it comes to contributing to the innovation that drives the company’s success.
Why does this matter so much? Frankly, engaged employees lead to bottom line benefits.
They are more thoughtful with company money, work more intently, and more efficiently. Research shows engaged employees lead to increased productivity, higher sales, and lower turnover.
To increase psychological ownership, which boosts discretionary effort, that drives employee engagement, examine these four areas of your workplace:
- Job Fit: Alignment between employees natural tendencies and their key job responsibilities
- Manager Impact: Alignment between manager and employee
- Organizational Culture: Alignment between who how employees are expected to show up in the workplace and who they really are
- People and Teams: Alignment between people that evokes feelings of belonging and connection
Want to know more about engaged employees? Download Predictive Index’s Decoding Employee Engagement ebook for free.
About Abby
Abby Siegel Hyman is the Marketing + PR Manager at Amber Hurdle Consulting, and is a dual master’s graduate student at Vanderbilt University. She is the proud mom of the goldendoodle Willie–one of the office dog cheerleaders that keeps AHC innovative and engaged. Connect with Abby on LinkedIn.
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Amber Hurdle Consulting is a multi-award-winning talent optimization firm that pioneers using both science and marketing principles to solve these problems by strengthening your brand from the inside out. As a Predictive Index (PI) Certified Partner, we teach you how to generate and use real data in the form of people analytics, and then we sit on your bench as analytics experts, bringing along almost 20 years of branding, marketing and public relations experience. With these tools, we partner with you to design a compelling internal relations strategy featuring three key areas:
#1 We work with your leaders on their personal brands, so they increase self awareness and see and harvest the greatness in others.
#2 We teach you to use a scientific, repeatable method to recruit, retain and inspire top talent, elevating your culture while crafting a world-class employer brand.
#3 We then help you leverage strong leaders and a “best places to work” environment so that happy employees are serving happy customers…ultimately elevating your business brand.