Employee Engagement Quotes: 33 Quotes to Get HR Inspired

If you are an HR professional in the modern era, I would bet a thousand dollars that you’re strategy includes focusing on employee engagement. (But don’t hold me to that bet, I don’t want to go broke!)

If you’re just starting out with employee engagement initiatives, though, you may need a little boost to get motivated (or, dare we say, engaged). And what’s a better motivator than some great inspirational quotes? They help us get off the couch and workout so why not employee engagement. Plus, they can help get the buy-in from your CEO to start an initiative in general!

But before we get started with sharing our favorite employee engagement quotes, let’s talk a little bit about what employee engagement actually is.

What Is Employee Engagement Really?

While some companies choose to specifically focus on other areas of human resources: leadership development, culture, or even performance, other organization create a broader HR strategy that focuses on employee engagement as whole.

This is because no other areas encompass as many different functions as employee engagement.

Employee engagement strategies include leadership development, culture, performance, and many different areas of human resources. So, by focusing on your employee engagement, you actually improve all of these other smaller areas of the HR puzzle.

According to Forbes:

“Employee engagement is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals.

This emotional commitment means engaged employees actually care about their work and their company. They don’t work just for a paycheck or just for the next promotion, but work on behalf of the organization’s goals.

When employees care—when they are engaged—they use discretionary effort.”

So, now that we are all clear about what the term employee engagement actually means, let’s get into our favorite quotes about it.

33 Employee Engagement Quotes to Inspire HR Professionals

1. When leaders throughout an organization take an active, genuine interest in the people they manage, when they invest real time to understand employees at a fundamental level, they create a climate for greater morale, loyalty, and, yes, growth. – Patrick Lencioni
2. Employees are a company’s greatest asset – they’re your competitive advantage. You want to attract and retain the best; provide them with encouragement, stimulus, and make them feel that they are an integral part of the company’s mission. – Anne M. Mulcahy
3. 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
4. Employee loyalty begins with employer loyalty. Your employees should know that if they do the job they were hired to do with a reasonable amount of competence and efficiency, you will support them. – Harvey Mackay
5. When employees join executives in truly owning the responsibility for business success, an exciting new sense of teamwork takes hold. – Punit Renjen
6. Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first. – Angela Ahrendts
7. In a nursery, if you don’t take care of those plants, your profits get lost real quickly. You have to weed. You have to water. You have to nurture. Also, you have to take care of your employees in such a way that they do the same. – Jack Dangermond
8. Research indicates that employees 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
9. Research indicates that employees 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. – James Sinegal

   

10. Creating a strong company culture isn’t just good business. It’s the right thing to do, and it makes your company better for all stakeholders – employees, management, and customers. – Julia Hartz
11. Take time to appreciate employees and they will reciprocate in a thousand ways. – Bob Nelson
12. Take time to appreciate employees and they will reciprocate in a thousand ways. – Lee Iacocca
13. The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.- J. Paul Getty
14. Employees don’t need to be best friends, but there does need to be a level of mutual respect and understanding. – Kathryn Minshew
15. If you believe, as I do, that your employees truly are your most valuable asset, you will do whatever you can to help them do their jobs as well as possible. – Harvey Mackay
16. Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy. – Warren Buffett
17. I have always believed that the way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers, and that people flourish when they are praised. – Sir Richard Branson
18. Of the top 10 sources of innovation, employees are the only resource that you can control and access that your competitors cannot. Employees are the one asset you have that can actually be a sustainable competitive advantage. – Kaihan Krippendorff
19. The role of the CEO is to enable people to excel, help them discover their own wisdom, engage themselves entirely in their work, and accept responsibility for making change. – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
20. Your mission statement, vision statement, core values, and service standards provide a clear focus for all while keeping your team humble and hungry. It creates that family environment in which your employees enjoy coming to work and dealing with the challenges they face each day. – Amber Hurdle
21. If you do not treat people with the respect they deserve, do not expect any kind of commitment to your productivity goals and target. – Ian Fuhr
22. Do not instigate or treat any of your employees, working at your place, with contempt. Treat everyone with respect. You never know what benefit a person will bring. – Dada Bhagwan
23. By letting your employees grow, your company will also grow exponentially. – Mark Samraj
24. It’s not that these employee-focused initiatives are unimportant. It’s just that your immediate manager is more important. – Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman
25. Employees aren’t just workers, they’re the backbone of business and that makes them more important than the boss any day of the week. Good Employees = Good Business – Kilroy J. Oldster
26. Your assets are your employees. Invest more on those performing well. Let the non performers go. – Manoj Arora
    
27. The masters and overseers were so good at employee development, in their absence, the employees still achieved the company’s mission. – Darnell Lamont Walker
28. We can never fall short when it comes to recruiting, hiring, maintaining and growing our workforce. It is the employees who make our organization’s success a reality. – Vern Dosch
29. Motivating employees to work at their full potential is the main premise of successful management. – Eraldo Banovac
30. The growth of an organization is not dependent on the number of employees in its register. It is dependent on the number of employees who show dedication and commitment to the vision of the organization. – Israelmore Ayivor
31. If you fulfill the wishes of your employees, the employees will fulfill your visions. – Amit Kalantri
32. Children imitate their parents, employees their managers. – Amit Kalantri
33. To paraphrase Einstein, insanity is expecting employees to do one thing while rewarding them for doing something else. – Robert G. Thompson

While reviewing employee engagement quotes can be the perfect way to motivate yourself, it should be just the starting point in your research about employee engagement. Make sure to check out our blogs about employee engagement best practices and employee engagement metrics to start developing your employee engagement plan.

Aley Brown

Aley is a versatile global business leader with proven experience managing high-performing teams and engaging a data-driven approach to strategies that exceed company objectives.