Employee Engagement Steady or Rising

Monday, 11 February 2013

Employee engagement levels are stable or rising worldwide, according to the 2012 Blessing White Employee Engagement Research Report. This is good news for business as engaged employees are enthusiastic about work, which in turn is good for performance.

Key findings from the research report include:

• “Intent to stay”, a main predictor of future turnover, remains stable. While engagement and intent to stay are directly correlated, the specific dynamics of retention appear to vary significantly from one region of the world to the next.

• The dynamics of tenure, level and age remain the same — as people grow more experienced and vested in their work, or more senior in the organisation, engagement increases.

• While gender is not a significant factor or engagement in western economies, large gaps in engagement levels between men and women are apparent in India, the Persian Gulf and South America.

• When it comes to drivers of engagement, clarity on the organisation’s priorities, getting feedback, having opportunities to use skills and career development remain at the top of the list for a majority of employees. What these factors mean in practice, however, can be deeply personal.

• Globally, a greater percentage of the workforce trust senior leaders and managers. Trust in managers remains predictably higher than trust in executives.

Based on the 2012 observations, BlessingWhite recommends that:

• Organisations gain a firm grasp on how engagement can drive their business results in very specific terms, and adopt a common definition of engagement which makes it something tangible to business outcomes.

• Senior leaders renew efforts to provide alignment to business strategy by increasing communication and clarity, as well as providing an inspiring vision for the future.

• Engagement initiatives focus on equipping every level of the workforce, clarifying who is accountable for what and how best to contribute to a culture of employee engagement.

• Development efforts focus on “career” as a way of aligning long-term employee aspirations with the organisation’s talent needs of tomorrow.

• That managers address disengagement decisively without letting the disengaged monopolise their efforts.

Source: GP Strategies.

This article appeared in the US Intelliconnect HR Tracker on 31 January 2013.