People who are engaged in their jobs—
those who are enthusiastic and involved
in their day-to-day work—tend to do better
work. This statement makes intuitive sense
to most people and is our basic premise in
this article. We cover three main questions
related to this premise. First, what specifically
does job engagement mean? Second,
what is the economic case for the importance
of job engagement—in other words,
what is the hard evidence that job engagement
really matters? Third, what can be
done to improve job engagement? Throughout
this article, we focus on employee surveys
as an important means of measuring
and improving job engagement.
WHAT JOB ENGAGEMENT MEANS
We define job engagement as a person’s enthusiasm
and involvement in his or her job.
People who are highly engaged in their jobs
identify personally with the job and are motivated
by the work itself. They tend to work
harder and more productively than others
and are more likely to produce the results
their customers and organizations want. For
instance, engaged employees report that: