The
following is an excerpt from “ENGAGEMENT
MAGIC: Five Keys for Engaging People, Leader, and
Organizations.”
In the fall of 2014, we released the book MAGIC: Five
Keys to Unlock the Power of Employee Engagement. But
the book didn’t start there; it began nearly twenty years
prior, as our organization, DecisionWise, conducted our
first employee
engagement survey.
At that time, the concept of “employee
engagement” was largely unknown. Companies had just
begun to understand the idea of employee
satisfaction and the notion maybe, just maybe, the
employee experience had some impact on the bottom line. If
it truly did impact the bottom line, wouldn’t it make sense
to measure what employees felt? And thus, the idea of the
employee survey began to catch on.
As our firm spent the next decade knee-deep in employee
survey administration and data, themes began to emerge.
First, it was clear that engagement does impact the
bottom line. There is no doubt that organizations with
higher levels of employee engagement tend to outperform
other organizations in financial measures, customer service,
employee retention, quality, innovation, and a host of other
key performance indicators.
Second, an excellent customer
experience (CX) is the direct result of a superlative
employee experience (EX). Thus, if an organization wishes to
drive customer satisfaction, it has to first start with the
employee experience. From this concept, my colleague Matthew
Wride and I released the book The
Employee Experience: How to Attract Talent, Retain Top
Performers, and Drive Results. That book was an
instant success and best seller, largely because
organizations resonated with the concept that EX = CX.
Third, we discovered that engagement
is a competency. This was a monumental find, as it meant
that engagement can be learned, practiced, taught, measured,
and even expected of employees and managers, and that they
can be held accountable for engagement. This also meant that
engagement isn’t something that’s simply felt; it requires
action. A feeling without action is just that – a feeling.
But feelings aren’t results, and organizations aren’t hiring
people simply to feel. Engagement involves both feeling and
acting.
In 2014, our research database was made up of 14 million
employee survey responses. Over the past four years, that
database had more than doubled to over 32 million survey
responses. That’s a lot of data! Which brings me to the
final point.
With the doubling of the research database, the concepts in
the first book – the idea that the keys to employee
engagement could be explained by the acronym MAGIC
– were validated time and time again, both by research and
the practical experience of our clients.
In 2018, DecisionWise finished another chapter in the ongoing
journey to understand employee engagement, and brought this
updated research to this new book, Engagement
MAGIC. Written as an update to the first book,
and including these new findings, Engagement MAGIC
provides updated case studies, stories, examples, and
research. I am confident that you will find these keys as
essential in your individual and organizational engagement
as our clients have discovered them to be in theirs.