When the topic of Employee Engagement comes up, common questions from HR practitioners and company executives go along the lines of;
- "What are the impacts and costs to our organization of a disengaged workforce?"
- "What's the R.O.I. of a culture and engagement improvement initiative"
- "How can we build a business case to implement a new/better engagement program?"
Engagement is critical in today's workforce as it forms a key element of the overall Employee Experience and the need to address it in new ways is more important than ever.
Let's take a look at a few key factors that can be used to determine your company's next course of action.
Cost of Doing Nothing or Maintaining the Status Quo
Disengaged employees lead to a dysfunctional workforce.....and vice-versa. Numerous studies indicate that managers spend up to 40% of their time dealing with concerns within their team while employees spend up to 7% of their time in some form of conflict or misunderstanding in their team.
Even a small business with 50 employees and 5 managers may 'waste' close to $400,000 annually on workplace-related issues.
And when an employee is disengaged they usually have low esteem, don't feel valued and don't believe their work serves a purpose. As such their effort and productivity is lower which costs you invaluable time and money.
To put it in no uncertain terms - doing nothing to address dysfunction and disengagement negatively impacts the bottom line.
Want More Proof?
Try the Employee Engagement Calculator to estimate the cost of poor workplace relationships in your organization...and remember the intangible costs of low morale, reduced productivity, etc...
Build Engagement at the Local Level by Empowering Your Workforce
The days of doing a company-wide, point-in-time, opinion survey are antiquated and coming to an end. This annual ritual is extremely burdensome on HR and management with the employees seeing little value in participating.
After all, doing a survey in January, getting results in March, agonizingly looking for one-size-fits-all ideas and rolling something out many months later just doesn't make sense.
The employees feel their personal input has very little impact, and what are told in the 'You spoke we listened" clichéd communication is really just what HR and management want them to hear.
Getting your staff to provide feedback relevant to themselves and the close-knit community they interact with every day is a much more personal and quicker way to identify issues. By then empowering these individuals and teams to address their needs you see exponential increases in job satisfaction, morale, and productivity.
Free HR and Management to Do What They Do Best
As mentioned above, it is much better to empower individuals rather than burden Human Resources and departmental managers with the arduous task of data mining traditional surveys and trying to work out what will work for everyone. Indeed, most managers have a hard time deciding what to do with the data and/or new ideas they have just been handed.
Instead, HR and Leadership should be champions of a program that encourages and trusts the employees to be agents of change while they focus on other critical elements of their day-to-day job.
Big Picture Numbers Paint a Grim Picture
Recent research by leading organizations such as Gallup shows some remarkable trends...
- $400,000,000,000+
- The annual cost to US Businesses due to decreased productivity attributable to disengaged employees (try the Engagement Calculator to see how much YOUR organization contributes to this number)
- Industry leaders thoughts on Employee Engagement
- >90% agree it directly impacts business success
- <25% have a plan or strategy to address it
- 3 out of 4 Employees attribute their voluntary resignation to their working relationship - usually with their boss
- Sick-days and absenteeism
- 2.69 # of days taken annually by Engaged Employees
- 6.19 # of days taken annually by Disengaged Employees
The Bottom Line is That You Can Dramatically Improve Your Bottom Line by Simply Improving Relationships and Engagement in the Workplace.