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Data keeps pouring in on the importance of employee engagement.
One of the most impressive entries yet is a monumental survey recently completed by Watson Wyatt. The company’s survey included 13,000 U.S. workers and found that highly engaged employees are 26 percent more productive than disengaged employees, and their companies earned 13 percent more shareholder return over the last five years.
There’s more. The engaged employees also take 20 percent fewer days off and tend to be more supportive of organizational change.
So how do you achieve that engaged workforce? Watson Wyatt has some suggestions—and they’ll sound pretty familiar to regular readers of the TGIM blog:
• Demonstrate strong leadership and clear direction;
• Communicate clearly, especially in times of change;
• Emphasize customer service;
• Reward good work and celebrate success.
Despite this avalanche of compelling data, companies across the country are STILL responding to economic challenges by cutting some of these very things—cutting employees out of the communications loop in times of crisis, throttling customer service initiatives, and cancelling employee incentive programs and incentive programs left and right.
Am I missing something here?
We KNOW that employee engagement improves profitability. And we KNOW what leads to higher employee engagement. These are not mysteries. So why is the business section so full of stories of companies in deep financial doo-doo taking steps to cover themselves even deeper in doo-doo?
The evidence for the importance of employee engagement was once largely anecdotal. It ain’t anecdotal anymore, folks. The jury is in, and big, solid studies like the Watson Wyatt survey have brought the gavel down.
It’s time for companies to put solid knowledge into practice, building an engaged workforce as the engine of profitability and growth, ESPECIALLY in tough financial times.