Employee Engagement And All That Fluffy Stuff!

Employee engagement is a workplace approach to ensure that employees understand their organisation’s goals and values. It’s important they know how to apply them to their role and are motivated to contribute to the success of their workplace, whilst feeling an enhanced sense of personal wellbeing and satisfaction.

However, they could be missing a trick. Employee engagement – when done well and when it’s more than just ‘lip service’ or ‘box ticking’, can have true benefits to the bottom line as well as employee satisfaction.

A motivated, informed and engaged workforce is more productive, less likely to leave and will deliver better business performance.

But don’t just take my word for it, here are some independent results, which indicate why employee engagement could give your organisation the edge:

• Organisations with recognition programmes which are highly effective at enabling employee engagement had 31% lower voluntary turnover than organisations with ineffective recognition programmes – (Bersin by Deloitte, The State of Employee Recognition, 2012)
• Being able to track the effectiveness of engagement and recognition efforts can help organisations better align engagement with business objectives and improve performance – (Aberdeen Group, The Power of Employee Recognition, 2013)
• Our research finds that those organisations with the most mature employee recognition approach are 12 times more likely to have strong business results – (Bersin by Deloitte, The Employee Recognition Maturity Model, 2012)
• 60% of Best-in-Class organisations stated that employee recognition is extremely valuable in driving individual performance – (Aberdeen Group, The Power of Employee Recognition, 2013)

We have worked with a number of organisations to improve their employee engagement and have seen some significant results.

We have reduced attrition from 59% to 29% at a large financial services call centre, improved cross-selling for a multi-sited firm of solicitors by identifying employee knowledge gaps, instigated a peer-led recognition scheme at a large insurance company, created an internal brand to disseminate the values for a significant petrochemicals business and undertook the internal communications plan for communicating the re-naming of a household name brand.

Each of these campaigns has delivered business results including higher staff retention, improved performance (individually and corporately) and stronger business performance. And with 46% of senior managers viewing recognition programmes as an investment rather than an expense – (WorldatWork, Trends in Employee Recognition, 2013), employee engagement doesn’t sound so fluffy after all.

If you would like to learn more about what Intergage can do to assist with engaging your employees, come along to our Marketing Leaders Lunch.