|
Increased Productivity & Profitability Through Employee Engagement
Organizations that engage their workforce by developing them, creating opportunities for them to contribute ideas and provide them with the skills to improvement their own performance are much more successful at creating an engaged workforce.
If you do an internet search on employee engagement you will come across a number of articles that analyze and discuss the Gallup Management Journal polls, Towers Perrin, Hay Consulting Group studies and several others. The studies show that companies in the top-quartile for employee engagement have 18 percent greater productivity levels — and 12 percent higher profitability — than the bottom quartile companies. That all results in 2.6 times faster growth in earnings per share.
Getting employees engaged in what they do can be difficult for managers. I suggest everyone that is concerned with attracting and retaining qualified workers should look at the Gallup Management Journal study. What makes this study worth reading is that it is one of the few that measures the degree to which employees are engaged and links it to profitability. This is noteworthy for corporate management in this era of mergers, acquisitions and spin offs. Measuring engagement can be subjective, but it doesn’t need to be. Gallup offers these benchmarks for trending engagement:
- Absenteeism
- Average Years of Service
- Quality Performance
- Safety Performance
- Productivity
- Customer Satisfaction
I recommend surveying your team members in two areas; general climate surveys and motivation and coaching surveys. Using standard surveys semiannually or annually will help you to confirm that changes are being made. Examples of recommended surveys can be found at the following links:
Sample Surveys
Besides Gallup, other groups have determined the following general management factors that drive employee engagement.
- Trust/integrity — how well managers communicate with employees and cause the employees to value their relationships with managers.
- The work itself — making it stimulating day-to-day.
- Line of sight between employee performance and company performance — helping employees understand how their work contributes to the company's success.
- Offering career growth paths and helping develop employees’ professional skills.
- Creating employee pride in their organization — paying attention to how much self-esteem the employee feels by being associated with their company.
Please review our Leadership web page to learn more about financial performance and how leadership and management development training can increase financial performance.
|
