According to Rodd Wagner, BI Worldwide vice president of employee engagement strategy, 'engagement' is metric used by businesses, and term rarely used by employees. Rather, employees use happiness to describe level of satisfaction with working conditions and organizational environments.
In an article by Fast Company, Wagner describes four myths surrounding employee engagement:
- There is no proof that happy employees will do anything great for your company: A study by BI Worldwide found that 93% of happy employees are willing to work especially hard for their organization's customers.
- Somebody can be happy at work, but not engaged: Wagner says the majority of engaged employees are happy, and happy employees are engaged.
- Measuring happiness isn't enough to build a successful business: "Engagement and satisfaction are different aspects, but deep in the fine print the research overlaps making them statistically identical," says Wagner.
- Employees are happy because they're lazy: Most people enjoy working and "want to make a greater contribution as long as they’re not being yelled at and stressed out, says Wagner."
