The 5 Keys to the MAGIC of Employee Engagement

Engaged employees are fully committed to their work. So what is employee engagement and how is it created?

Our partner Decision Wise in 2014, MAGIC: Five Tricks to Employee Engagement and he published a book called.

When they started researching for the book about three years ago , their aim was to find answers to two questions:

1. What is employee engagement?
2. What causes employee engagement?

Answering these questions was not as easy as they thought. After analyzing over 14 million employee surveys in 70 countries, they were able to answer these two questions.

What is employee engagement?

On this topic trainingswe often ask employees the question: "What do you think a good day at work looks like?" The answers vary. Sometimes respondents associate a good day with accomplishing something important. Sometimes they talk about solving a customer problem, making an important discovery, curing a patient, or getting a machine back up and running on the assembly line that no one else can fix. "It's a good day, the day without my boss!" is also a staple of every session. But that is a separate issue.

Two important points emerge from these discussions. First, the responses rarely mention employee perks or rewards. Second, deep down, employees know what engagement is - and what it is not. They are aware of this.

So what is employee engagement? This is how we define it:

Employee Engagement is the state of mind when we feel passionate, energized and dedicated to our work. When this happens, we give ourselves - heart, soul, mind and hands - fully to what we are doing.

What causes employee engagement?

Media stories aside, Google Trends data shows that employee engagement is a hot topic. The number of searches for the term "employee engagement" increased by 122 percent in the 2011-2013 period compared to the 2005-2007 period. Data from 2015-2018 also shows that searches for the term increased by about 25 percent per year. The trend line is striking: There is a consistent and large increase of interest in employee engagement.

Once the concept of employee engagement is understood, we turn to the next question: What causes employee engagement?

Initial research by our partner Decison Wise in 2014 clearly identified five elements of engagement that are the drivers of employee engagement. The extent to which these elements are present in the organization determines the level of commitment within the organization.

We call these elements "The Five Tricks of Employee Engagement". In the intervening four years, Decision Wise has completed the second phase of the research and in January 2019 we will present the second book to you: It's called MAGIC in Engagement: Five Tricks to Engagement in Organizations, Managers and Individuals.

When we put these five tricks in a row, we get the acronym MAGIC. These items and acronyms are also a method that makes it easier for a manager to grasp and keep in mind the topic of employee engagement. Time and time again, we have seen that when organizations and managers focus on these five items, employees choose to bring more of their heart, soul, mind and hands to their work.

Do you want engaged employees in your organization? Do you think they can make you more innovative, competitive and profitable? The answer to both is most likely yes. So let your employees find MAGIC in their work. So they can give themselves fully to their work.

This is the power of employee engagement.

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