Organisations have been talking about employee engagement for years but research shows that for many businesses, engagement levels have become stagnant, with many feeling they’ve not made the gains they’d anticipated for the investment they’ve made.
New UK research, ‘Employee Engagement: It’s Time to Go All-in’, carried out by Dale Carnegie discovered that although 85 per cent of leaders say employee engagement is a priority, only a third of organisations actually make it one, instead just paying lip service to the concept. In fact, 35 per cent of leaders said that focusing on employee engagement was a distraction from getting the ‘real’ work done.
But the business case for engaging employees is stronger than ever, with credible data showing that engaged employees are the new competitive advantage and companies with highly engaged workforces outperforming their peers by 147 per cent in earnings per share. With the cost of replacing the average employee being in excess of £30,000, the case for keeping your people happy is stronger than ever.
Getting employee engagement back on the agenda needn’t be a mammoth task, with the study also showing that employees are four times more likely to get the job done if their manager made employee engagement a daily habit.
With many companies wanting to take employee engagement to the next level to maximise performance, Dale Carnegie’s research suggests that by enabling every leader in an organisation to make engagement a daily habit is the only way for businesses to get the results they desire.
To allow UK businesses to understand the findings further, the world-renowned training company are running a series of free events across the country so that senior leaders across all disciplines can get a more in-depth understanding of the challenges and strategies to overcome them.
Click here to view dates/locations for Achieving Breakthrough Engagement: Enabling Leaders To Take Employee Engagement to the Next Level
Four ways to turn employee engagement into a daily habit
- Treat employee engagement like all other strategic priorities
- Engage leaders at every level. Creating a culture of engagement involves everyone. Only 33 per cent of senior leaders said their company engaged them, so it’s vital organisations raise awareness of the business and personal benefits to every level of management within their organisation
- Provide practical knowledge and skills – 74 per cent of UK respondents said they did not feel they had sufficient training in how to engage their team
- Align reward and recognition – leaders who strongly agreed that they expect to be rewarded and recognised for having fully engaged employees are at least twice as likely to make employee engagement a daily priority than all others
Download the full report here.