100 Employee Engagement Quotes To Reinvent The Modern Workplace

Employee engagement is that one aspect that can either propel a company to new heights or cause havoc on its bottom line. This is illustrated in our collection of employee engagement quotes from great leaders and personalities.

We cannot coerce Employee engagement. Instead, it requires constant effort and a positive attitude.

You might have employees who are disengaged and less motivated towards their work, and that can be a big concern.

• 27% of employees will accept a new job if they get the opportunity to do more meaningful work.
• Highly engaged business teams result in a 21% greater profitability.
• Organizations with high employee engagement outperform those with low employee engagement by 202%.

It's an open secret that engagement is vital in a workplace, and the above data just proves the point.

So, we've compiled a list of the top 100 employee engagement quotes to help you understand why it's so crucial in the workplace.

1. Timothy R. Clark

Highly engaged employees make the customer experience. Disengaged employees break it.

2. John Wooden

A good coach can change a game. A great coach can change a life.

3. Kevin Kruse

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

4. Tim Clark

...You have to want to be engaged. There has to be deep-seated desire in your heart and mind to participate, to be involved, and to make a difference. If the desire isn’t there, no person or book can plant it within you.

5. David Zinger

Create caring and robust connections between every employee and their work, customers, leaders, managers, and the organization to achieve results that matter to everyone in this sentence.

6. Stephen R. Covey

Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.

7. Dale Carnegie

Throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could be yours.

8. Steve Jobs

The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

9. Patrick Lencioni

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.

10. Angela Ahrendts

Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.

11. Ian Hutchinson

Employee engagement is an investment we make for the privilege of staying in business.

12. Bob Nelson

Take time to appreciate employees and they will reciprocate in a thousand ways.

13. Simon Sinek

If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood, sweat, and tears.

14. David Zinger

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.

15. Kenneth Thomas

To build a culture of engagement it is important to incorporate training on intrinsic motivation and employee engagement into management development programs.

16. Jorge Paulo Lemann

The greatest asset of a company is its people.

17. Marilyn Carlson

On what high-performing companies should be striving to create: A great place for great people to do great work.

18. Marissa Mayer

It’s about getting the best people, retaining them, nurturing a creative environment and helping to find a way to innovate.

19. Tom Peters

The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.

20. Ken Blanchard

Connect the dots between individual roles and the goals of the organization. When people see that connection, they get a lot of energy out of work. They feel the importance, dignity, and meaning in their job.

21. Darryl Dioso

Employee engagement is the degree to which an employee feels that they are truly part of a company, have a voice in its decisions and feels respected.

22. Tony Hsieh

We think it’s important for employees to have fun.. It drives employee engagement.

23. Mike Abrashoff

It all came down to employee engagement. It all came down to recognition. It all came down to leadership, which led every sailor feeling ownership and accountability for the results. You can ask a team to accomplish a mission but can’t order excellence.

24. Ben Simonton

Turned on people figure out how to beat the competition, Turned off people only complain about being beaten by the competition.

25. Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.

26. Franklin Delano Roosevelt

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

27. Anne Mulcahy

Employees who believe that engagement 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.

28. Sybil F. Stershic

The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel.

29. Jack Welch

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.

30. Amit Kalantri

If you fulfill the wishes of your employees, the employees will fulfill your visions.

31. Leigh Branham and Mark Hirschfeld

It’s sad, really, how a negative workplace can impact our lives and the way we feel about ourselves. The situation is reaching pandemic heights – most people go to work at jobs they dislike, supervised by people who don’t care about them, and directed by senior leaders who are often clueless about where to take the company.

32. Peter Senge

Business and human endeavors are systems... We tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.

33. David Packard

A group of people get together and exist as an institution we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively that they could not accomplish separately – they make a contribution to society, a phrase which sounds trite but is fundamental.

34. Anne M. Mulcahy

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.

35. Marco Rubio

This is the only country in the world where today’s employee is tomorrow’s employer.

36. Tracy Streckenbach

Culture is about performance, and making people feel good about how they contribute to the whole.

37. Pamela Stroko

People want to know they matter and they want to be treated as people. That’s the new talent contract.

38. Francis Hesselbein

Dispirited, unmotivated, unappreciated workers cannot compete in a highly competitive world.

39. Zig Ziglar

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.

40. Betty Bender

When people go to work, they shouldn’t have to leave their hearts at home.

41. Charles Schwab

I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among men the greatest asset I possess. The way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement.

42. Buddha

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.

43. Anonymous

Don’t build a company, build a family

44. Brad Federman

Paychecks can’t buy passion.

45. Napoleon Hill

Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.

46. Anonymous

Give them a vision, not the task, and the job will be done very effectively.

47. Peter Drucker

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

48. Lee Lacocca

Take time to appreciate employees and they will reciprocate in a thousand ways.

49. Mary Kay Ash

Everyone wants to be appreciated, so if you appreciate someone, don’t keep it a secret.

50. Bob Kelleher

Some companies don’t have an engagement problem, they have a hiring problem.

51. Bill Gates

Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company

52. Eraldo Banovac

Motivating employees to work at their full potential is the main premise of successful management.

53. Aaron Tucker

Environments that support their employees in the right way will naturally foster employee engagement.

54. Paul Marciano

Engaged employees are in the game for the sake of the game; they believe in the cause of the organization.

55. Janine N.Truitt

Employee engagement is the extent to which your employees feel connected to and motivated by the work that they do.

56. Richard Branson

Customers do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers.

57. Gallup Report 2017

Engaged employees are psychological “owners,” drive performance and innovation, and move the organization forward.

58. Nigel Paine

In the current volatile and uncertain environment, engaged employees are an essential component not just for success, but perhaps for survival.

59. Matt Charney

The key element of engagement is trust; building trust requires companies to provide workers with as much autonomy and flexibility as possible.

60. Sam Walton

Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a well-choosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.

61. David Ducheyne

Employee Engagement is about the willingness of people to be responsible for more than their own job. People who are engaged go to the extra mile.

62. Jill Christensen

Engagement occurs when workers trust leaders and feel an emotional connection to the organization – the same way they did their first day on the job.

63. Guy Ellis

Employee engagement is all about maximizing employee productivity by creating the right conditions to motivate employees to contribute their maximum effort, skills, and knowledge.

64. Peter Thiel

You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done.

65. Amber Lloyd

Employee Engagement is often misunderstood to mean happiness or contentment but it really boils down to something more complex that all employees, managers and the c-suite care about.

66. Gordon Tredgold

Leaders engage their teams by giving them a sense of purpose, providing them opportunities to develop and advance, and putting them into positions where they can be successful.

67. Francis Haselben

Disappointing, unstoppable, unnecessary, workers cannot compete in a highly competitive world.

68. Wisdom

Your job is to discover your work and then give it to yourself wholeheartedly.

69. David Ginger

Build a caring and strong relationship between every employee and their work, customers, leaders, managers, and the organization that results in this sentence for all.

70. Gordon Troggold

Leaders give their teams a sense of purpose, give them opportunities to grow and grow, and place them in positions where they can succeed.

71. Anne M. Mulkahi

Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – and not just an employee – are more productive, more productive, more complete. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.

72. Anonymous

Kindness, like a boomerang, always returns.

73. Confucius

There is one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life — reciprocity.

74. Seneca

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.

75. Meghan M. Biro

Employees engage with employers and brands when they’re treated as humans worthy of respect.

76. James Russell Lowell

For every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action...

77. Maya Angelou

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back.

78. Kahlil Gibran

You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

79. Albert Pike

What we have done for ourselves alone, dies with us; what we have done for others and the world, remains and is immortal.

80. Anonymous

You make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give

81. Anonymous

Nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something.

82. Anonymous

Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful.

83. Malayan proverb

One can pay back the loan of gold, but one dies forever in debt to those who are kind.

84. Voltaire

By appreciation we make excellence in others belong to us as well.

85. William Feather

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim.

86. G. B. Stern

Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone...

87. Tom Brokaw

It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.

88. Seth Parker

You may not have saved a lot of money in your life, but if you have saved a lot of heartaches for other folks, you are a pretty rich man.

89. Cynthia Ozick

We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

90. Doug Conant

To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace

91. John C. Maxwell

The people closest to me determine my level of success or failure. The better they are, the better I am. And if I want to go to the highest level, I can do it only with the help of other people. We have to take each other higher.

92. John Quincy Adams

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

93. Stephen Covey

What you do has far greater impact than what you say.

94. Carl Jung

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

95. Anonymous

A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.

96. Romain Rolland

If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself.

97. Anonymous

Behind every great leader, at the base of every great tale of success, you will find an indispensable circle of trusted advisors, mentors, and colleagues.

98. Max DePree

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.

99. Gary Hamel

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.

100. Robert G. Thompson

To paraphrase Einstein, insanity is expecting employees to do one thing while rewarding them for doing something else.

Takeaway

Employee engagement is an ever-changing parameter. The more time you devote to learning about it, the better you will lead your team.

These employee engagement quotes serve as a timely reminder that a workplace where employees are free to be themselves is a workplace where people are more engaged.