Build It
The Rebel Playbook for World-Class Employee Engagement
by Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey
About this book
Build It (2018) takes a look at one of the most important yet overlooked secrets behind business success: employee engagement. Drawing on a decade of research into 2,000 companies, Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey explore the tactics of some of today’s best-known firms to shed light on how they keep their workers switched on and productive. One common theme? They all tore up the HR rulebook, and this path-breaking book is designed to help you do just that.
We’re thrilled to announce that the authors have worked together with Blinkist to create this book-in-blinks for you.
Chapter Preview
Chapter 1 of 13If you want to get the most out of a business, you need your employees to feel engaged.
Have you ever had a job where the only thing you cared about was your paycheck? Or maybe you’ve been lucky and had a job you just couldn’t wait to start each morning?
That’s the difference between a disengaged and an engaged employee.
So what defines engagement? Well, the first thing to note is that it’s not the same thing as happiness.
All sorts of things might make an employee happy. Great pay, a nice office and next to no responsibility add up to a pretty comfortable gig, but they don’t mean that someone will be engaged with their work.
A truly engaged employee fits three criteria. First off, they understand and believe in the direction in which an organization is moving. Secondly, they can see how their role contributes to achieving that goal. Lastly, they’re genuinely invested in their employer’s success.
You can see why engagement is so important! It makes businesses stronger and more innovative.
That’s because engaged employees make better decisions. After all, they know what their company’s aims are and want to contribute to realizing them.
Take the British retailer Marks & Spencer. An internal study found that the stores with the highest employee engagement rates were twice as likely to receive the highest service rating. Staff absences, by contrast, were a whopping 25 percent lower.
Engagement is also becoming more vital as the world changes.
The pace of technological change today is breathtaking. In the early twentieth century, it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users. Facebook achieved that in a single year; Angry Birds needed just 35 days!
If companies want to keep up, they need engaged, adaptable workers striving for success. There are plenty of examples of businesses that didn’t achieve this – just think of the once mighty Blockbuster empire. It failed to adapt to the rise of online streaming. Today, it’s a mere ghost of its former self.
That leads to the million-dollar question: How do you cultivate a sense of engagement among employees?
In the following blinks, we’ll explore the authors’ brand-new trademarked model designed to do just that – the Engagement Bridge™.
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