Significance of Employee Engagement

$483 billion to $605 billion – that’s how colossal the damage made by “actively disengaged” employees to the U.S. economy is, each year in productivity losses (Gallup, 2017). To put this in context, the cost of productivity losses from disengaged employees to the U.S economy per year, is more than 5 times the GDP of Sri Lanka in 2017, which was $87 billion (Sri Lanka Department of Census & Statistics, 2018).

Employee engagement is achieved when an employee’s enthusiasm for work is stimulated and directed towards the success of the organization (Armstrong, 2009). This means that there exits a definite correlation between employee engagement and organizational success. It can also be inferred that the employee disengagement is a factor that can contribute to the failure of an organization.

Its important to understand how engaged employees can benefit an organization and its even more important to be aware of the adverse effects actively disengaged employees can cause. Video 2 summarizes some of the key significances of employee engagement. Below are some of the key points: 

·         Engaged employees perform better than those who are disengaged

·         Engaged employees are 87% less likely to seek other employment opportunities

·         Engaged employees take fewer sick days off than disengaged employees

·         Engaged employees act as ambassadors of the organization, ensuring customer satisfaction by going above and beyond 

It’s vital to look at the flip-side of the above as well:

·         Disengaged employees perform below par, compared to those who are engaged

·         Disengaged employees are 87% more likely to seek other employment opportunities

·         Disengaged employees take more sick days off than engaged employees

·         Disengaged employees do not act as ambassadors of the organization, they will at most only do what they are “asked to do”

Video 2: Why employee engagement matters

 Source: (ENGAGE, 2016)

Though most organizations may chose to believe that their employees are engaged (or at least not actively disengaged), Gallup survey from 2018 summarized on Figure 07 shows a shocking 13% of the workforce in the U.S are actively disengaged while only 34% are engaged.   

Figure 07: Employee Engagement Trending in the U.S 

Source: (Harter, 2018)

At my current workplace, employee satisfaction surveys are used to measure engagement but the data gathered is not analyzed in ways that it can infer the percentage of engaged, disengaged and actively disengaged employees separately. However, it was interesting to note on the last survey, that most of the questions had about 10 to 20 responses falling in to “completely disagree” category (negative responses). Even more interestingly, upon closer examination it was found out that those 10 to 20 responses mostly came in from a common group of responders. This can be taken as an indicator of the presence of actively disengaged employees, though the number seems insignificant compared to the total employee population of 450. 

Over the last three years, the number of these “completely disagree” response has been increasing and symptoms of disengagement such as increase in employee turnover and drop in productivity have come to light. It would be fascinating to analyze the data further to find correlations between the negative responders and the key performance indicators of those teams & departments.

Having established the significance of employee engagement, it is critical for any organization to be aware of where it stands & what percentage of employees fall in to each of the categories, so that the necessary remedial action plans/strategies can be implemented before it’s too late – specially for fast growing organizations, this is a vital aspect of ensuring sustainable growth.

References:

Armstrong, M. (2009). Armstrong's handbook of human resource management practice. 11th ed. London: Kogan Page, pp 338-340.

Gallup (2017) State of the American Workplace. [Online] Available at: https://news.gallup.com/file/reports/199961/SOAW_Report_GEN_1216_WEB_FINAL_rj.pdf [Accessed 23 September 2019].

Harter, J. (2018) Employee Engagement on the Rise in the U.S. [Online] Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/241649/employee-engagement-rise.aspx [Accessed on 23 September 2019].

Sri Lanka Department of Census & Statistics (2018). ECONOMIC STATISTICS

OF SRI LANKA 2018 [Online] Available at: http://www.statistics.gov.lk/EconomicStat/EconomicStatistics2018.pdf [Accessed 15 September 2019].