So now that employee engagement has been defined, why should I care? What will it do for me? How does it help us succeed in our mission?
These are all good questions and the great part is that they are also pretty easy to answer. First of all the basic definition of an engaged employee is that they are “passionate about their jobs” and are “putting in discretionary effort into their work”! As we mentioned previously, these are great teammates to surround yourself with and these teammates will help you address your top HR challenges and improve your operational performance.
SHRM surveyed several thousand HR leaders around the country and asked them for their top three HR challenges they expect to face over the next decade. The results were not surprising:
- Retaining and rewarding their best employees
- Developing the next generation of corporate leaders
- Creating a corporate culture that attracts the best employees to the organization
These three challenges are best met by having a highly engaged workforce. If your workforce is highly engaged then you know that your best employees are passionate about their job and your organization. To keep them that way, you are already frequently recognizing them for the great results they are producing and the hard work they are investing. Another way that you are engaging your workforce is by making sure that they are well trained for their current job and moving forward with training for their next job. Also by identifying the next potential leaders of your organization you are able to provide them with even more training and encouragement to succeed. Finally all of your effort to engage your current employees pays off with reduced recruiting efforts for new great employees as your engaged workforce attracts new prospects through their friendships with other great people and their overwhelming enthusiasm for your organization.
Gallop looked at the relationship between an organization’s employee engagement levels and their operational performance and found that they could correlate lower absenteeism, turnover, shrinkage, safety incidents and quality defects with higher levels of engagement. In addition they could also correlate higher productivity, profitability and customer retention to the higher levels of engagement. When you combined employee engagement with customer engagement, organizations could achieve as much as a 240% boost in overall performance. Most importantly, they found that the top employee engaged organizations have 3.9 times the earnings per share growth over comparable organizations with low employee engagement.