Harvey Deutschendorf recently published on Fast Company a post called
7 WAYS TO KEEP EMPLOYEES HAPPY in which he explains how Marriott Hotels and Southwest Airlines know that keeping their employees happy and motivated also keeps their customers satisfied.

The article is an impressive description of the best practices of creating happy employees but it was missing one very important thing: employee engagement. In this post we’ll focus on some figures and benefits from high levels of employee engagement and give you a few do’s and don’ts on how you can elevate engagement in your own firm.

According to Towers Watson, organizations with high engagement are 40% more profitable. Gallup states that engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2 sick days per year while the disengaged take 6 and reinforces with some interesting data: Engaged employees are 76% better at meeting customer needs, 72% more effective at reducing costs, 95% more creative, 78% better at solving problems, 70% less absent, 43% more productive, and not surprisingly 87% happier at work.

If you want your employees to be happy you should engage them. The best way to do that is by providing something attractive to both individual employees and the company – something in which employees feel they have a voice, are as important as anyone else in the organization, can freely collaborate, and have as much information as leadership (information restrictions and secrecy are very demotivating). Business and/or pure innovation challenges are the perfect way to get all these things. Not only will companies get employee engagement, they will also get relevant and valuable content for analysis and implementation.

Exago believes engagement is key for an innovation program to succeed. Therefore, our model is designed to reach different competencies and profiles so the majority of users feel motivated to participate. We have also developed methods to maximize the value of people’s participation and to assure everyone feels recognized in the process.

By engaging employees we create happier employees (employee satisfaction tends to increase with clients who use our model) and that, as previously mentioned, will indirectly create more satisfied clients and higher profits for the company.

Check out also this article on How to Engage your Staff at Each Stage of the Employee Lifecycle.