WHAT IS EMPLOYEE
ENGAGEMENT?
According to a CEB report:
■■ Employee engagement is, “a heightened
emotional connection that the employee
feels for his/her organization, that,
in turn, influences him/her to apply
additional discretionary effort to his/
her work.”
■■ “Emotional commitment drives effort.
Emotional commitment is four times
as valuable as rational commitment in
producing discretionary effort. Indeed,
the search for a high-performing
workforce is synonymous with the
search for emotional commitment.”
The emotional commitment triggers a
domino effect of business benefits. Here’s
how it works:
1. Emotionally connected employees
stick around, they are less likely to
leave. “Engagement is the key to
performance and retention. Highly
committed employees are 87 per cent
less likely to leave than employees with
low levels of commitment,” the CEB
report stated.
2. The emotional connection results in
additional discretionary effort, too.
The outcome? Significantly higher
rates of productivity. More output.
Less downtime, absenteeism and
tardiness. Higher quality, less rework.
More work getting done in less time.
Research from Jim Kouzes and Barry
Posner in Great Leadership Creates
Great Workplaces demonstrates that,
“The best leaders elicit three times the
amount of talent, energy, commitment
and motivation from employees
compared to their counterparts.”
3. With employees who stick around
and improvements in productivity,
the next natural result of employee
engagement is a boost in customer
satisfaction. A report from Gallup
stated, “Organizations with above-average
levels of employee engagement
reap 50 per cent higher customer
loyalty levels.”
4. More customer loyalty produces
higher top line revenue. “Employee
engagement scores were 21 per cent
higher in double digit versus single
digit growth companies.” When sales
people stay in their jobs, they maintain
customer relationships and secure
more repeat business. This, too, helps
with revenue growth.
5. It’s not just top line, the bottom line is
also favourably impacted by increases
in employee engagement. The revenue
growth plus expense reductions (from
less money spent on recruiting, hiring,
onboarding and fewer errors, less
overtime and less customer churn)
result in stronger profit margins.
The Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis
reported that in one study of 23,910
business units, when the top quartile
and bottom quartile engagement
scores were compared, those in the
top quartile averaged 12 per cent
higher profitability.
Customer satisfaction and loyalty are
directly linked to employee engagement,
especially the engagement of sales pro-fessionals.
This domino effect all begins
with employee engagement. In fact, DDI’s
white paper Employee Engagement: The
Key to Realizing Competitive Advantage
stated that, “engagement is the primary
enabler of successful execution of any
business strategy.”
WHAT’S THE SECRET TO
INCREASING EMPLOYEE
ENGAGEMENT?
If a business can get all these benefits by
simply boosting employee engagement,
the question is: How can an organization
boost employee engagement?
The best way to boost employee
engagement is by developing leaders and
managers. According to The Corporate
Leadership Council, “The manager has
tremendous impact on employees’ levels of
emotional commitment to the team, orga-nization
and job.”
No other factor matters more. Kouzes
and Posner measured ten demographic
variables (age, country, job title, etc.)
and found that no demographic variable
made a significant impact on the level of
engagement. They also measured thirty
discrete behaviours of leaders and found
that each of these behaviours, alone,
could have a double-digit impact on
improving engagement.
Clearly, the attributes and activities of
a manager have a direct correlation to an
employee’s emotional commitment and this
translates into business results. According
to Gallup, companies that increase their
number of talented/trained managers
(versus untrained) and double the rate of
employee engagement because of it achieve,
leadership
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Engaged employees help boost overall sales and customer satisfaction
38 ❚ CONFERENCE ISSUE 2019 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL
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