OKR Performance: Employee engagement.

 Key results such as a high employee retention rate, job satisfaction, and consistently good performance, coupled with strong feedback loops, can reveal the reality behind the objective of excellent Employee engagement. Employee engagement, when deployed effectively, can dramatically affect your company’s performance and company culture.

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Employee engagement is a broad topic yet with high relevance to sustained company performance. This writing will focus on key elements of engagement as it relates to both team performance and individual employee performance.

Employee engagement and company culture

All engagement happens within the context of company culture. A prudent starting point in improving employee engagement is to address any toxic elements of your current working environment.

Even when excellent engagement protocols are deployed yet, it is executed within a toxic business culture, the sustainability of positive and effective engagement is under serious threat from the onset.

Serious effort is being put into town halls, targeted training and coaching, collective fun and clear feedback, and performance frameworks to uplift the company’s performance. 

Concurrently the old habit of negative gossip and ‘naysayers’ having a ‘field day’ without any deterrence is at play. Unchecked and persistent negative habits are likely to triumph new employee engagement efforts if left unaddressed from the start of the change initiative. Achieving goals becomes harder and harder if cultural issues are not addressed.

Company culture can be described as what all employees collectively and regularly habitually do. Company climate can be described as how team members feel about the company culture. In the case of quality and frequent engagement, stakeholders are more likely to feel good about the company culture.

The following Harvard business review article delves into ways that companies can immediately improve employee engagement:

https://hbr.org/2021/10/how-companies-can-improve-employee-engagement-right-now

Boosting Employee Engagement and Performance

“Turned on people figure out how to beat the competition.Turned off people only complain about being beaten by the competition.”

Ben Simonton

People that are hired because they love what they do, skilled people with a hunger for honing skills, even more, people that feel they are part of something bigger, people that share values and a strong team purpose, to them, there is no question of engagement, they are fully committed to the cause and will set ambitious goals.

Reaching ambitious goals is not an easy task and engagement methodology should consider numerous factors such as:

• Team dynamics
• Leadership styles
• Communication styles
• Personality types
• age, and culture

Engagement must happen within a safe, unbiased, nonjudgemental, and positive environment wherein the collective Vision, purpose, values, and OKRs are the main components of the ‘playing field’ instead of too many rules and too many stifling policies.

Employee engagement as an Objective and linked key results

Employee engagement as a key objective linked with empowering key results such as employee retention, very low absenteeism, and increased sales can be a potent combination in uplifting the general company performance.

when employees are engaged and having fun but only for the sake of engagement and fun, poor work performance can still be an end result. Uplifting engagement should not be the only goal and also purely a goal within itself.

Engagement should always be in alignment with company goals. Still, have fun while pursuing these goals bearing in mind that consistent performance ensures sustainability. When actions and goals are meaningful, they add to levels of job satisfaction and positive experiences.

Executive summary

Employee engagement and all stakeholder engagement, for that matter, are of critical importance when a company’s performance is considered. However, engagement should happen within the context of a growth culture, the vision of the company, and other goals.

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