4 ways to RAMP up your employee engagement

Many organisations across the globe are implementing cultural change programs to become more customer centric (discussed in our article The 6 essential ingredients of a customer centric culture).

Not enough of those same organisations recognise that their efforts to achieve customer centricity will be sabotaged if they don’t have a highly engaged workforce.

Organisations can’t expect to have happy customers on one end of the phone line if they have unhappy employees on the other.

And employee engagement isn’t just critical to customer centricity; it’s essential for the successful execution of your strategy as it drives greater productivity and innovation. If you are serious about creating a better place to work and becoming more customer centric, effective and profitable then you need to RAMP up your employee engagement.

But how do you do that? What does all the research say about how you can RAMP up your employee engagement? Or put another way, what are the main levers you can pull to drive an increase in your employee engagement? What are the intrinsic motivators of employees and what will drive their engagement?

The most famous research on intrinsic motivation was done by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan¹. They created their Self Determination Theory where they identified three things as intrinsic motivators: Autonomy, Competency and Relatedness.

Daniel Pink drew on more than 40 years of evidence in his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us², to conclude that the three main intrinsic motivators are: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

Insync has drawn on Deci, Ryan and Pink’s research and its own research based on hundreds of organisational surveys involving hundreds of thousands of employees to conclude that the four main intrinsic motivators and therefore drivers of engagement are: Relationships (or relatedness), Autonomy, Mastery (or competency) and Purpose.

Here is Insync’s RAMP model of engagement.

Insync’s descriptions of the items under each of the four headings are under constant review. They have been slightly adapted since Insync developed its RAMP Model in early 2015 based on its ongoing research and experience and that of its clients. Feedback on the elements of Insync’s RAMP Model and any of its other Frameworks and Models are always appreciated.