Why Should You Care About Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement has galvanized attention in recent years. In good economic times, this becomes a focal point for retention strategies because engaged workers tend to be more committed to their orga­nizations, work, and customers, and are thus less likely to resign. In bad economic times, engagement becomes a focal point for productivity enhancement, as workers feel demoralized by—among other things— pay freezes, lay-offs, furloughs, and budget cutbacks affecting everything from supplies to technology. During these tough times, workers often feel trapped in bad situations—unable to be happy (or engaged) where they are, and unable to move to greener pastures elsewhere, thanks to limited work opportunities. Whether times are good or bad, employee engagement can—and should—be a front-burner topic that is linked to an organization’s competitive advantage and an individual’s productivity and morale.

Why should you care?

Employers and individuals should care about employee engagement, but they may have different reasons for doing so.

For managers, engagement is a way to combat feelings of alienation, disempowerment, and low morale. Doing work that is not meaningful can lead to apathy, and apathy can lead to disengagement. Research has shown that low levels of engagement can be linked to higher turnover rates, lower customer satisfaction, higher incidences of health and safety problems, and low productivity and profitability.

Employee engagement programs cannot be everything to everyone. They should be created with good business reasons in mind, but the reasons—and thus the emphasis—of such programs may vary. Before starting an employee engagement program, the employ­er needs to be clear about what goals he wants to achieve. He needs to recognize that some goals must take precedence over others, depend­ing on the organization’s current needs. By being selective, the employer will be better able to focus his efforts to create a cost-effective program that provides the highest value activities possible to achieve the goals and measure the results.

The following is a list of seven key reasons engaged employees are vital to an organization.

• Engaged workers are more likely to remain in their organizations and are less likely to resign.

• Organizations that have engaged workers are more likely to enjoy financial success than those that do not.

• It is less likely that organizations with engaged workers will have to devote time and money to solving employee performance, turnover, and poor morale problems.

• Organizations with engaged workers are less likely to have trouble attracting the best people.

• Organizations with engaged workers have fewer work-related accidents.

• Organizations with engaged workers have lower stress-related problems that can lead to skyrocketing benefits and workers’ compensation costs, including drug abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, cancer, heart disease, and so forth.

• Organizations with engaged workers are more likely to have loyal, committed customers, while organizations with a high percentage of disengaged workers are more likely to have problems with retaining customer loyalty.

Learn more about employee engagement from the latest ATD Press book, Creating Engaged Employees, available now.