Fostering a positive and enriching employee experience and prioritizing employee engagement is no longer an optional "perk."
It’s a must in the modern workplace — a critical business function that directly affects business outcomes.
Business units with engaged workers have 23% higher profit compared with business units with unengaged workers. Additionally, teams with thriving workers see significantly lower absenteeism, turnover and accidents; they also see higher customer loyalty.
“Engaged employees make it a point to show up to work and do more work — highly engaged business units realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism and a 17% increase in productivity,” according to Gallup.
On the other hand, a study on employee engagement found that companies in the U.S. lose between $450-$550 billion each year due to disengaged workers.
Source: Heartbeat by Workday
What causes such a significant loss? It’s attributed to disengaged employees’ lack of motivation and a lower sense of responsibility, which ultimately results in lower productivity, more frequent errors, poor customer service, and lower profits.
A single disengaged employee can cost a company about $3,400 in lost productivity for every $10,000 in salary.
With global workforce engagement at just 21%, many organizations are struggling to get — and keep — employees engaged, resulting in reduced profitability and ultimately, higher turnover.
“Simply put, engaged employees produce better business outcomes than other employees do — across industries, company sizes and nationalities, and in good economic times and bad,” explains Gallup’s Jim Harter.
“Business or work units that score in the top quartile of their organization in employee engagement have nearly double the odds of success (based on a composite of financial, customer, retention, safety, quality, shrinkage and absenteeism metrics) when compared with those in the bottom quartile. Those at the 99th percentile have four times the success rate of those at the first percentile.”
How can organizations improve employee engagement, even in industries with historically low engagement rates?
