Paper Title
Employee Performance Development Through Employee Engagement

Abstract
Employee engagement has become a top business priority for senior executives. In this rapid cycle economy, business leaders know that having a high-performing workforce is essential for growth and survival. They recognize that a highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity, and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention in highly competitive talent markets. But while most executives see a clear need to improve employee engagement, many have yet to develop tangible ways to measure and tackle this goal. However, a growing group of best-in-class companies says they are gaining competitive advantage through establishing metrics and practices to effectively quantify and improve the impact of their engagement initiatives on overall business performance. The research found that while most leaders understand the importance of engagement, three-quarters of those surveyed said that most employees in their organizations are not highly engaged. A significant gap showed up in the views of executive managers and middle managers in this area. Top executives seemed much more optimistic about the levels of employee engagement in their company, making them seem out of touch with middle management’s sense of their frontline workers’ engagement. The survey found that many companies find it challenging to measure engagement and tie its impact to financial results: fewer than 50 percent of companies said that they are effectively measuring employee engagement against business performance metrics such as customer satisfaction or increased market share. But one group of companies—called “high prioritizers” in the study because they saw engagement as an extremely important priority—are effectively using metrics and shared some best practices for tying engagement to business performance. Keywords: Employee performance, Employee Engagement