Recently, there have been some eye-opening reports about the state of employee engagement, both here in the U.S. and globally. Aon Hewitt, in their 2017 Trends in Global Employee Engagement Study, found that engagement levels have dropped for the first time in five years and Gallup reported in its State of the American Workplace report that a full 70% of U.S. workers are not engaged at work.
But before we all get too breathless about these admittedly disconcerting engagement numbers, it’s important to remember that employee engagement is not an end in and of itself. Engagement numbers do provide a window into the general well-being of your workforce, but more important than the raw numbers is how engagement ties back to desired business outcomes.
What is employee engagement? A guide to engaging your employees
Say, stay, strive
Aon Hewitt, in an influential 2015 paper advanced the “Stay, Stay, Strive” framework for the variety of desired Employee Engagement outcomes. According to that model, engagement drives a variety of desirable outcomes, including increased employee advocacy and a more desirable employer brand (“Say”), improved retention and tenure (“Stay”), and better overall performance (“Strive”):
“One manager may have an employee who is incredibly hardworking but needs to say more positive things about the company due to his/her network impact on peers. Another manager may have employees who generally seem positive about the company and committed to staying, but need to ramp up individual effort toward the new performance behaviors required by an organizational transformation.”
So it really isn’t just about the score, it’s about understanding what you need to measure in order to achieve the desired business outcome.
Are you measuring what matters?
Do you know how well your engagement programs are working? How about the connection between programs that engage employees, such as employee recognition and rewards, and your desired business results?
Employee engagement has become a cornerstone and calling-card of today’s most successful businesses. But instituting a haphazard or incomplete engagement initiative can often lead to more problems than solutions, as employees dutifully fill out their surveys but nothing ever seems to come of it.
Successful employee engagement programs should tie back to specific organizational goals, help to align employee values with company values, and ultimately — drive improvements in overall performance. Studies have shown that highly engaged employees are:
- 21% more profitable;
- 17% more productive, and;
- Enjoy 20% higher sales than industry peers with average engagement.
Whether your measure for success is better employee retention, improved alignment with company goals, or increased revenue, your journey begins in first knowing what to measure and how to do it well.
An engaged workforce is almost always a profitable workforce. According to Gallup, companies with a well-defined culture of recognition and commitment to employee engagement have been shown to outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share. Learning how to measure engagement – and what to measure – are the first steps towards realizing the engagement advantage. By measuring engagement in a number of ways and against a number of different metrics, companies can then learn what actions they need to take to improve in this important area of differentiation.
What you’ll learn
Having a better understanding of what makes your organization tick can help you find a competitive edge that you didn’t know existed. In our new eBook, “Employee Engagement: Four Places to Start Measuring What Matters,” we provide four ways to effectively measure the results of your engagement programs to ensure success in areas critical to your business – such as employee retention, performance against goals, and alignment with company values. Download the eBook now and begin learning how to measure what matters!
