The Impact of Engaged Employees

The desire for employee engagement-essentially emotional connections between employees and their companies may not have been so important years ago but things have changed. The need to engage employees is critical to achieve the employee interaction and commitment required to drive your business success and compete in today's marketplace. That, in turn can go a long way toward building customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and company profits.

Every company has several groups that they need to keep happy. This includes shareholders, employees, management, customers, suppliers, etc Employee engagement has important implications for all of these groups as well as the brand of the company. To ensure that you meet the commitments and expectations of all groups you have to have employees who are engaged and enthusiastic about their work, have the right training, the right tools and information and the authority to take action. Tom Miller explains engagement this way "It's an employee who interacts with the company, who brings new ideas about how to do the work, who's willing to train or mentor and be an advocate for the company and the people he or she works with without necessarily being asked, " Mark Schumann suggests engagement means "Every company looks for that 'something extra' that will motivate employees to invest themselves in what the organization pursues. This 'engagement' of employees is a combination of functional and emotional commitment - the functional commitment to get things done and the emotional commitment to invest 'something extra' in the success of the efforts. The ultimate result of engagement is a workplace committed to achieving real results that can be measured in metrics of financial return, employee turnover and productivity." According to Allan Schweyer, Executive Director of the Human Capital Institute, Further, Schweyer says, "Engaged employees are more productive and maintain better customer relationships. It's critical therefore, for organizations to nurture and engaged workforce. Selection and training of managers is a key component to this, so organizations focused on engagement need to include manager training on engagement in their talent-development strategies."

Engagement now means much more than simple or traditional reward and recognition programs. Now these activities have to be integrated with leadership practices, communication initiatives, training, customizations of needs and desires, etc, etc in order to be effective. It is more of a holistic approach and strategizing on where engagement is heading in your organization, what it means and how you are going to get there. It is also critical that management is fully committed and supports the programs so that everyone is on the same page. Where reward and recognition programs play a role is to support the culture of engagement. It is important to have a system in place that reinforces and encourages the desired behaviors, attitudes and performance throughout the organization. Otherwise things just get out of control, and it is very difficult to pin down what the company culture is.

Remember Plato's ancient statement " What is Honored is Cultivated!!"

Support Research and Numbers.....

• A recent Blessing White study found that there's a clear correlation between engagement and retention, with 85% of engaged employee indicating that they plan to stay with their employer for at least the next 10 months.
  
• Towers Perrin found that high-engagement firms experienced an earnings-per-share (EPS) growth rate of 28%, compared with an 11.2% decline in low-engagement firms.
  
• Gallup research indicates that public organizations ranking in the top quartile of employee engagement had EPS growth more that two-and-a-half times greater than organizations that were below average.
  
• Data from Best Buy show that stores where employee engagement increased by a tenth of a point (on a five point scale) experienced a $100,000 increase in annual sales.
  
• JC Penney has found that store with top-quartile engagement scores generate roughly 10% more in sales per square foot than average and 36% more operating income than similar sized stores in the lowest quartile.
  
• A Manpower survey of call center customers and employee revealed that centers with high employee satisfaction also have high customer satisfaction, whereas centers with low employee satisfaction have low customer satisfaction.
  
• A report by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHEM) estimates that by strengthening engagement, MolsonCoors saved more than $1.7 million in one year - citing one example where the average cost of a "safety incident" for an engaged employee was $63, compared with the average of $392 for a disengaged employee.
  
• Gallup research has also shown that engaged employees are more productive, profitable, safer, create stronger customer relationships and stay longer with their company than less engaged employees.

Motivation Strategies magazine; Selling Communications, Inc.

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