The Importance of Pursuing Employee Engagement

by Brenda J. Christie

The Candle Problem

In an earlier post, The True Cost of Bad Leadership, I wrote about an HBR article that focused on how companies can loose revenue due to the behavior of some of its leadership.

A more recent article, "Why Employee Engagement Is Critical to Corporate Success" which appeared on Mashable, looks at the potential for revenue loss attributable to employees who are bored, dissatisfied or disengaged.

Webster's dictionary defines the verb, 'Disengage' as "to stop being involved with a person or group : to stop taking part in something."

Some of the stats attributable to this sense of not being involved  or part of something are quite alarming:

1. Only 30% of the employees polled in a recent Gallup poll said they felt engaged by the work they do, i.e., 70% of the employees by contrast are bored, dissatisfied, disengaged.  This is a remarkable number.
2. Less than half the employees surveyed said they felt their company fostered anything other than mediocrity.
3. The cost of training a replacement for a disengaged employee who leaves can be up to 61% of the role's salary.

All of these statistics point to an incredible productivity loss as well as an economic loss equivalent to $2,000 per employee who leaves due to a sense of hopelessness or lack of opportunity.  These are incredible numbers -- $2,000 per employee.  It is doubtful that any company would knowingly let someone pilfer that much in goods or services and yet, apparently, it happens through neglect.

The article's author, James O'Brien, makes four suggestions for opening up a dialog to discourage that sense of disengagement.  To summarize, these are:

1. Cultivate a work environment that promotes openness, honesty and sensitivity to employee needs (think Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs).  This is where Emotional Intelligence and Communication skills play very important roles.
2. Promote a culture of collaboration where employees can speak and be heard.  This is where ownership comes into play.  Someone who 'owns' a task, or 'owns' a project has a vested interest in making it succeed.
3. Shift to a team-based model to foster a sense of belonging.  This is very different from a top-down, "the boss" environment.
4. Leadership Has to Support the Idea of Inclusion.  When hiring, ensure that prospective managers and leaders espouse the principles of reward and respect and have the same passion for career and personal growth as those they would lead.  They will be in the trenches and/or sensitive to what drives their employees.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article and hope you will too.  The Mashable article can be found here.

Also see Dan Pink's Ted Talk on alternate motivators.  He discusses a different approach to motivating and engaging employees and points out an inverse relationship between traditional monetary incentives and productivity.  Dan Pink highlights several global studies conducted whose results are unexpected.  His Ted Talk and the incentives that do work, namely, Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, are located here.  

Best,

Brenda J. Christie