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To work is a fact of modern life for all but a privileged few. Even the least ambitious will acknowledge that. It is a reality that must be faced and understood. Work plays a substantial part in almost everyone's life, if only because it consumes such a large portion of it.

As a manager within a business your concern is to get the most out of your employees. Given the place work plays in most people's lives it's in your interest to make the experience as pleasant as possible.

The best employee is a happy employee. A happy employee is an engaged employee - and by engaged I mean they value the organisation they work for and their role within that. They come to work happy and they go home happy. In between they perform their work diligently and with pride. They are productive, motivated and efficient. And so as they take satisfaction from what they do the organisation they belong to gets a direct benefit from that.

Sounds simple then - an engaged employee makes for a productive employee. Create a culture of engagement and you create a productive environment. Right. So how do you do that?

Think of a workplace as a structured environment made up of individuals marshalled into a team to perform a common task. That's a very simple definition, but serves our purpose well. The key aspects in this definition are the two words: individual and team. They are separate things, distinctly so, and demand a different management approach, yet there is much in common.

We may describe these two aspects in another way, as the foreground and the background elements. The foreground is about the employee as an individual, how he relates to his colleagues and to his role. It accounts for his particular skill set, his aspirations, how he approaches the job.

By contrast the background is the over-arching way of doing things, how the business interacts with the employee, the group dynamic. This is how the team works, and its effectiveness has a direct bearing on the effectiveness of your business.

Everyone is different, we know that. We are motivated by different things, stimulated differently, each of us thinks and feels in ways which are unique to us. There are sciences about this, and more tests, theories and schools of thought that than you can poke a stick at. That means each of us engages in different ways.

Many organisations use the obvious and less than subtle motivation of salary and bonuses as an incentive to buy complete engagement. As there are very few who work for

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