Engaging Employees Pays Off

(From Human Resource Executive Online) -- Australian research has shed new light on the importance of employee orientation to a company's bottom line.

Employee orientation has more of an impact on a corporation's financial performance than a focus on any other individual stakeholder -- including shareholders, customers, suppliers or the community, according to Most Valuable Stakeholders: The Impact of Employee Orientation on Corporate Financial Performance, by Nigel de Bussy, a marketing and business professor at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.

The key managerial point to take from his work is "engage your employees \[from the start of their employment\], pay attention to your employees, and you'll make more money," he said in a July 14 speech at the BledCom symposium, a global gathering of academicians and practitioners exploring communications and public relations management issues.

In his research -- which encompassed two separate studies of 491 Australia-based chief financial officers conducted in 2004 and 2010 -- de Bussy measured how strongly orientation toward the different stakeholder groups influenced corporate financial performance, resulting in an employment-orientation coefficient measurement of 0.84, compared to 0.36 for customers, 0.32 for communities and 0.08 for shareholders.

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