By Ian Ferguson

What every company wants from its staff is Employee Engagement: An individual sense of purpose and focused energy, evident to others in their display of personal initiative, effort and persistence directed toward organisational goals. Many employees pretend to be busy all day long, sometimes working long hours, moving fast around the office, but having little to no effect on the levels of output and productivity. The engaged employee has a clear focus on the company's objectives and is constantly pursuing the accomplishments of those objectives. Everyone understands that higher employee engagement means higher work performance and company loyalty.

While we understand the goal is to maintain high work performance standards and to create a greater sense of company loyalty, the question lingers, how best do we foster this? There is no short or easy answer to this question and for many years companies (public and private) have failed in motivating employee to expend their energy towards the common business purpose.

Our discussion today then provides relevant solutions to keeping employees engaged and productive. We provide five answers to this sometimes complex issue:

Training must play a major role in promoting more engaged employees. An orientation programme and soft skills training serves a vital role in remind employees of their purpose in the organisation. A strong emphasis on the vision, mission, values, objectives and soft skills required is crucial to on-boarding new employees and encouraging existing ones to remaining focused on the goals.

A dynamic and progressive work environment where objectives are being achieved and the company is making positive strides also keeps employees engaged and productive. When employees sense there are no levels of accountability nor opportunities for advancement, they will check out and become less productive.

Ownership: Employers need always to keep in the employees view the 'what's in it for me' answers. When an employee sees the major stake they have in the business and their levels of productivity and engagement affects the bottom-line which in turn adversely affects their ability to earn, it becomes a less challenging task to keep them focused.

The environment employees are expected to work determines the level of interest and employee engagement. If leaders model and strive to build a relaxed family environment where there is mutual respect and open communication, employees tend to remain engaged. When lines are crossed and trust is broken, people remain for the salary and benefits making as little contribution as possible.