

How engaged is your organisation?
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It's an age-old truism that having a happy and satisfied workforce leads to satisfied service users. Organisations with disengaged staff are organisations with a problem. There is a wealth of evidence available to support the notion that levels of staff engagement in healthcare settings are directly correlated to the quality and safety of patient care. An engaged workforce are an organisations greatest asset. A disengaged workforce in the world of health and social care is an accident, or worse, waiting to happen.
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Though the challenge of engaging staff is endemic in the public sector, a great deal of research undertaken in almost every sector shows a strong link between higher employee engagement, the levels of mental and emotional connection employees feel toward their employer and their workplace, to a great many tangible benefits including reduced stress, improved wellbeing, increased job satisfaction, higher productivity, and greater staff retention. Engaged employees are absent for fewer days each year and are significantly more mentally present at work.
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How engaged are the employees in your organisation? Many organisations spend large amounts of time and effort on internal communication campaigns that have no measurable impact. Many employers are unaware that these traditional forms of communicating account for less than ten percent of an employee's perceptions about their employer and their employment experience. The remaining ninety percent of employee perceptions are formed by the actions, the formal and informal structures, and the behaviours of managers and peers that employees see and witness around them in their everyday work environments.
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Employees do not look to their organisations vision and values statements when thinking about the choices facing them in a work situation, they look to those around them, taking their behavioural cues from what they see happening in practice, not what might be written on the glossy poster in the foyer.
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The outflow of qualified staff from across the entire health and care system is one of the most obvious indicators of the sector's ongoing struggle to truly value its greatest assets, to recognise what matters to its employees and what motivates them as people. But it doesn't have to stay that way...