If your employee engagement efforts have hit a wall, or you’re just not feeling it, take a few minutes to read these inspirational quotes from business leaders, experts and authors. Hopefully, they’ll help you get back your employee engagement mojo and serve as a reminder of the fundamental link between employee engagement and business success.
Hopefully these great thoughts will help serve as inspiration as you think about the importance of employee engagement to business success and consider how to create a team of highly invested, motivated and satisfied employees.
21 Employee Engagement Quotes:
- “There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow… It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it.” - Jack Welch, former CEO of GE
- “Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.” - Anne M. Mulcahy, former CEO of Xerox
- “When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” - Simon Sinek, author best known for "Start With Why."
- “Everyone wants to be appreciated, so if you appreciate someone, don’t keep it a secret.” - Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics
- “To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.” - Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup
- “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” - Max DePree, former CEO of Herman Miller
- “All employees have an innate desire to contribute to something bigger than themselves.” - Jag Randhawa, author of “The Bright Idea Box: A Proven System to Drive Employee Engagement and Innovation”
- “You can’t sell it outside if you can’t sell it inside.” - Stan Slap, management consultant
- “Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.” - Stephen R. Covey
- “Early in my career, one of the first business lessons I learned was this: It’s impossible to win the hearts and minds of people unless you clearly establish goals and values and reward people if they act in a way that leads to the fulfillment of those objectives. It quickly became clear to me that if you want to make sure your customers are treated well, you have to make sure you treat your employees well and recognize their efforts.” - F. Robert Salerno, CEO of Avis
- “Culture is about performance, and making people feel good about how they contribute to the whole.” - Tracy Streckenbach, founder of Hillview Consulting LLC
- “Research indicates that workers have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company.” - Zig Ziglar
- “The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.” - Gary Hamel, management expert
- “People leave when they don’t feel appreciated. That’s why we’ve made recognition a really high value. Our business is people-capability first; then you satisfy customers; then you make money.” - David Novak, CEO of YUM! Brands
- “Employee engagement is the art and science of engaging people in authentic and recognized connections to strategy, roles, performance, organization, community, relationship, customers, development, energy, and happiness to leverage, sustain, and transform work into results.” -David Zinger, employee engagement expert
- “The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel. And if your employees don’t feel valued, neither will your customers.” - Sybil F. Stershic, author of “Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care”
- “People want to know they matter and they want to be treated as people. That’s the new talent contract.” - Pamela Stroko, talent management expert
- “TURNED ON people figure out how to beat the competition, TURNED OFF people only complain about being beaten by the competition.” - Ben Simonton, management consultant
- “Highly engaged employees make the customer experience. Disengaged employees break it.” - Timothy R. Clark, executive coach and organizational consultant
- “Employees engage with employers and brands when they’re treated as humans worthy of respect.” - Meghan M. Biro, talent management and career strategist
- “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” - Steve Jobs