Foreword

Wouldn't you love to have a job where you woke up every morning with such a “fire in your belly” that you couldn't wait to get to work? Wouldn't you love it if you could be absolutely passionate about the work in which you're engaged, feeling a sense of deep purpose, meaning, and challenge in what you're doing? Finally, wouldn't it be great if you were so deeply engrossed in your work that you completely lost track of time? These three characteristics — vigor, dedication, and absorption — define a highly engaged employee. No wonder managers are striving to create conditions in which employees can experience high engagement. Those same managers see employee engagement as a sustainable source of competitive advantage that their competitors simply cannot copy. More specifically, they see high employee engagement as something that is valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate.

There is a well-defined logic that links employee engagement to bottom-line results, but several important preconditions, or characteristics of an organization's culture, need to be in place before employees can become highly engaged. These include features such as job challenge and a sense that employees are learning continuously; job autonomy, or the opportunity to work without close supervision; a supportive supervisor; an organizational climate of respect and trust; a work arrangement that matches each employee's desire for work-life fit; and economic security, the belief that your job is not at risk because your employer practices smart management to avoid downsizing. If those conditions are present, employees tend to be highly engaged and committed to their employers, and they intend to stay.

Employee engagement - at the individual, work team, and organizational levels is a topic of great practical importance to employees and to their managers, and there is a strong business case to encourage organizations of every stripe to take steps now to enhance employee engagement. Bob Kelleher's Employee Engagement For Dummies provides solid guidance about how to do just that, whether by promoting a sense of purpose and meaning in the work that an organization does, through leadership and coaching strategies, by harnessing generational values, by developing work teams that really work, by branding, or by gamification. The evidence to date suggests that high employee engagement levels are a win-win for all concerned, and that we all should strive to promote high levels of engagement. Yes, work can be fun!

Wayne F. Cascio, PhD
Denver, Colorado