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Improving employee engagement is a challenge that many organizations now recognize as critical to their performance and reputation. Its importance has been acknowledged on a number of fronts, including the major report on employee engagement recently commissioned by the UK government's Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) from David MacLeod ([5] MacLeod and Clarke, 2009). This article describes a concrete example of how one organization, Mersey Care NHS Trust - a UK public sector provider of health services that is part of the National Health Service (NHS) - is improving employee engagement by focusing on wellbeing.
Definitions of employee engagement vary but at the core of the concept is the idea that employees are connected to the organization in such a way that their discretionary effort is willingly released and they are prepared to "go the extra mile" for their organization. A core argument here is that this can only be achieved and sustained when employee wellbeing, particularly psychological wellbeing, is positive. The relationship between wellbeing and engagement is explored in Robertson Cooper's 2008 wellbeing report and associated research ([6] Robertson Cooper, 2008), as discussed below.
The relationship between employee engagement and wellbeing
Robertson Cooper has collected more than 80,000 cases of data using ASSET, its measure of psychological employee engagement and wellbeing. ASSET also measures the enablers and blockers of wellbeing and engagement, plus health outcomes and related factors like motivation and self-reported productivity levels. Because of the interest in both engagement and psychological wellbeing, the 2008 analysis focused on the factors that underpin employee engagement and productivity. The goal of the analysis was to explore the links between engagement, psychological wellbeing and productivity - concentrating the ASSET scales that measure psychological health, engagement and (self-reported) productivity.
In summary, the findings of the analysis show that engagement is linked strongly to productivity, as one would expect. But when the combined role of engagement and psychological wellbeing was explored, it was found that the correlation with productivity rose dramatically - suggesting that the combination of engagement with psychological wellbeing (PWB) is more powerful than engagement alone. As the diagram in Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] shows, two aspects of PWB - sense of purpose and psychological health - increased the overall correlation...