Employee engagement is a measurement of the level of discretionary effort employees employ in an organization. Many organizations have created definitions of employee engagement. EngageYourEmployees.com definition is “Empowered employees maximizing discretionary effort to achieve the organization’s goals and objectives.”. Employee engagement is a state where employees are maximizing their heart, mind and body, a state where they are fully contributing to the organization.
Employee engagement is scientifically linked to improved business performance. Hundreds of studies have demonstrated the links between increased employee engagement and improved business results. 93% of high performing organizations measure employee engagement. 1
All organizations measure and report their financial results but high performing organizations go down stream and measure employee engagement and customer satisfaction as they understand that both employee engagement and customer satisfaction our key drivers of financial success.
Increased employee engagement has been statistically linked in a multitude of surveys to the following:
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Increased Employee Retention
Increased Operating Margin
Increased Profitability
Reduction in Safety incidents
Reduction in Absenteeism
On the other end of the scale the highly engaged employees have dropped by 30% from over 15% of the workforce to approximately 10%.* So what is driving this dramatic deterioration in engagement? We need to consider the knee jerk reaction of many organizations. When times are tough they start cutting staff and this has a huge impact on engagement. First off the leaders that are involved in the cutting tend to experience a decrease in engagement and this leads to further disengagement of the staff. One of the drivers of engagement is the organization’s commitment to the employee. When the downsizing starts, employees start to second guess their organization and the commitment it has to employees. Let’s not be fooled into thinking that downsizing only impacts the employees leaving the organization. It impacts all employees including your high performers. The largest drop in engagement has been at the senior levels with the highly engaged dropping from almost 30% to around 13%.*
