Engaged and Productive Employees
Employee engagement is one of your most critical performance indicators. In identifying the three best measures of a company’s health, business consultant and former General Electric CEO, Jack Welch, cited employee engagement first, with customer satisfaction and free cash flow coming in second and third, respectively. If your employees are not happy, then your profitability and growth will suffer terribly.
Human resources has the potential to transform your business by catapulting your overall profitability and growth. Hewitt Associates describes employee engagement as an employee’s state of emotional and intellectual commitment to an organization or group producing behavior that will help fulfill an organization’s promises to customers – and, in so doing, improve business results.
Engaged employees:
→ Stay – They have an intense desire to be a part of the organization and they stay with that organization;
→ Say – They advocate for the organization by referring potential employees and customers, are positive with co- workers and are constructive in their criticism;
→ Strive – They exert extra effort and engage in behaviors that contribute to business success.
Research by Gallup and others shows that engaged employees are more productive, more profitable, more customer-focused, safer, and much less likely to voluntarily leave. Engaged employees also have fewer accidents, fewer absenteeism / sick days, expend a lot more discretionary effort in their day-to-day work. The statistics clearly demonstrate the business case for human resources professional support.
- In world-class organizations, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is 9.57:1; while in average organizations, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is 1.83:1.
- Organizations with high employee engagement had 13.7% growth in net income, over a 12-month period (Source: Towers Perrin Research Study)
- Organisations with highly engaged employees collectively saw earnings per share increase by 27.8% compared to companies with low levels of engagement which saw a fall of 11.2%. (Source: Towers Perrin)
- Highly engaged employees are five times less likely voluntarily leave their employer. As the cost of turnover is typically, 2.5 times an employee’s annual salary for recruitment costs and training, this is not insignificant.
