The Potential of High Employee Engagement

In the UK, organisations have recorded that only 3-25% of their staff are highly engaged, offering a huge improvement potential for those leaders who can demonstrate the link to profitability, productivity and staff tenure.

The government commissioned paper written by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke, entitled Engaging For Success, provides a number of statistics from various research sources which I think are really worthwhile being aware of when looking at ways companies can obtain a competitive advantage.  These include:

• Companies with highly engaged staff improved their operating income by 19.2%, whereas those with low engagement declined by 32.7%.  That’s nearly a 52 percentage point difference.
• Those with top quartile engagement scores averaged 12% higher customer advocacy, 18% higher productivity and 12% higher profitability.
• Those with bottom quartile engagement scores averaged 31–51% more employee turnover, 51% more inventory shrinkage and 62% more accidents.
• Engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.69 sick days per year; the disengaged take 6.19, with the CBI reporting that sickness absence costs the UK economy £13.4bn a year.
• Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave the organisation than the disengaged.  As a cost to organisations, this can be substantial eg. I worked out in one of my teams, that to replace just one person on a salary of £25k cost me an additional £25k (with time, agency fees, training, risk of errors etc).

Making the workplace a more productive, creative and enjoyable place to be now has some useful statistics to back up why organisations should consider more investment in time and money to achieve higher rates of employee engagement.  It would be interesting for all companies (small, medium and large) to calculate what these statistics would mean to their bottom line, especially when looking at the cost of any executive coaching and training.

Developing leadership skills that encourage effective communication, staff motivation, problem solving and innovation is not only important for the individuals in the team, but would statistically appear to be highly powerful for an organisation’s continued success.

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