3 Employee Engagement Books I Can Hardly Wait To Read

Continued learning through employee engagement books that touch on the core principles of improving engagement.

One of the happy problems with having an endlessly curious mind is that I always have more books on my list to read than I really have time in the day. By the time I finish one book, I have found at least two more to add to my read list (oftentimes from the very book I was reading!)

Employee engagement has been on the top of my mind this year. After reading Gallup’s recent State of the Workforce Report, among many other articles and studies, it’s become so apparent how important employee engagement, motivation, and loyalty are to a company’s bottom-line results.

Now that I’ve completed writing Crestcom’s new book, The Leadership Habit, I’m ready to jump back on my “read list”. I have three employee engagement books on my list that I am very excited to dig into because they touch on the core principles of improving engagement: purpose, experience, and loyalty.

Purpose Meets Execution: How Winning Organizations Accelerate Engagement and Drive Profits

Scheduled to start shipping on May 23rd, Purpose Meets Execution explores a concept that drives straight to the core of employee engagement principles. I think that organizations have started to forget (or ignore) this critical component of employee engagement, favoring tactics that are much easier to achieve, such as providing snacks in the office and happy hour Fridays.

For many organizations, defining and communicating purpose to help develop devoted, engaged employees is a far more difficult goal to achieve. You have to have the vision and the communication skills necessary to successfully develop a shared purpose that drives your employee engagement strategy. I am very excited to learn how the author, Louis Efron, helps companies and organizations take on this challenge to drive “executional excellence”.

The Employee Experience Advantage: How to Win the War for Talent by Giving Employees the Workspaces they Want, the Tools they Need, and a Culture They Can Celebrate

The Employee Experience Advantage came out early this year and I could hardly wait to get my hands on it. Now it’s hanging out on my “to read” shelf in the library, but not for long!

As the title suggests, author Jacob Morgan takes on the employee engagement challenge from the perspective of employee experience. The book purports to be packed with extensive research on how organizations can design organizational cultures to measure and improve the employee experience.

I think employee experience is emerging as a little bit of a hot-button issue (let’s call it a “warm button” for now), particularly in circles that like to debate multi-generational team management. Younger employees are getting a bad rap (whether or not they deserve it is a topic for another blog) because they expect a very different employee experience than the generations of employees before them. Whether their expectations are right or wrong, the reality is that today’s younger generation of employees is tomorrow’s generation of managers and leaders.

How can organizations and leaders today balance the need for a strong, thoughtful, and competent leadership pipeline with the expectations of young employees? How can we, as leaders, help shape those expectations into something innovative and constructive? These are just some of the employee engagement challenges and ideas that I look forward to exploring in The Employee Experience Advantage.

Fierce Loyalty®: The High Impact Leadership Formula to Transform Employee Engagement

Louise Mallam’s debut business book, Fierce Loyalty®, caught my interest because, well, don’t we all want to inspire fierce loyalty in our employees? Employee loyalty leads to improved productivity, innovation, and higher client loyalty and retention.

Specifically, I am looking forward to learning Louise’s perspectives on how leaders can improve their own coaching and mentoring skills to help develop the skills of their employees, therefore improving engagement and reducing turnover.

Employee loyalty is one of the keys of our May Develop Effective and Devoted Employees leadership training session. While purpose and employee experiences are very important aspects of employee engagement, the bottom line is the need to develop devoted, loyal employees who personally identify with your company culture and brand.

As the leader of an international leadership development organization, I am in a unique—and fun—position to be able to not only influence the engagement of my own employees, but also the engagement of employees and teams in hundreds of businesses and organizations around the world. This fact really lights my fire and motivates me to continue to learn from experts in the field as well as keeping in touch with current trends and research.