A Business Case for Employee Engagement

In recent years, Employee Engagement has become highly sought after by leaders across many different industries. In my 2/5/21 post “What Actually IS Employee Engagement“, I point out some of the difficulties confronting leaders who are trying to increase the level of employee engagement in their businesses. Specifically, “…managers get lost in theories and debates on definitions of ‘employee engagement’ and the 20+ drivers of engagement marked by researchers like BlessingWhite, Gallup, Towers Perrin and others, …which are too difficult for ordinary mortals to grasp or put into practice.”

But before I go any further into the essentials of employee engagement it may be beneficial to explain why seeking increased levels of engagement might be a worthwhile effort.

As mentioned in my previous article, there is a plethora of research on employee engagement. I personally relate best to the work done by Gallup because it meshes so well with my own past experiences. For decades, the Gallup Organization has been gathering data on why some people outperform others and what drives individual excellence. In surveying over one million employees across numerous companies they reported some remarkable findings. Their research showed that a more highly engaged employee will achieve higher attainment of customer loyalty, higher productivity and higher profitability – along with a lower turnover rate.

Here are those and some additional interesting research findings:

These statistics may make you wonder, “What is the difference between an engaged employee, employees who are not engaged and actively disengaged employees?” This knowledge is crucial if you are serious about learning more on employee engagement. Perhaps just reading the descriptions below will conjure up images in your mind of some specific employees in your organization?

You just saw in the previous info-graphic above how costly actively disengaged employees can be to an organization. You also saw that on average, 20% of the team may be actively disengaged in a typical organization. If having engaged employees is so beneficial, how do you know how many engaged employees you have? Disengaged employees? Well, that research has actually been tabulated by Gallup. Even though the data is now nearly a decade old, the findings year after year were fairly consistent.

The good news? There’s a ton of room for improvement.  But it makes you wonder, “If engaged employees add so much more value to a business unit, then why aren’t organizations more focused on it?” Great question…

When the Harvard Business Review asked 1500 top business executives which factors would most likely bring about success in their business. Here is what they found:

It was not surprising that employee engagement ranked in their top three answers. Ranking higher than a strong sales and marketing effort, innovation, continuous quality improvement, productivity and strong leadership. 

So, the research shows that business leadership’s perceptions as well as the empirical evidence both point to the very high value placed on employee engagement in an organization. Perhaps there is more of a focus on employee engagement in business today than in the past. But maybe a better question would be, “If engaged employees are so important, and everyone agrees that they are, then why aren’t more organizations able to move the needle on employee engagement?”

As someone who has had some success moving the needle on employee engagement across multiple companies, be sure to tune into Part 2 of this series where I will share a step-by-step checklist on “Building Engagement in Your Workforce”.