7 Undeniable Benefits of Employee Engagement

Apr 26, 2016 | 0 comments

Employee Engagement

Every experienced manager knows that engaged employees are crucial to the success of your team. But even if your intuition tells you that is the case, you may not realize just how much employees who care about their work matter in helping your company achieve its business goals. Here are 7 undeniable benefits of increasing your employee engagement, along with a few actionable solutions on how to achieve just that.

1) Enhanced Productivity

improve productivityResearch has shown time and again that engaged employees are better workers than their counterparts. In fact, market research firm HayGroup found employees who are committed to and enthusiastic about their work to be 43% more productive than employees who considered it ‘just work’ or were unhappy in their position.

Common sense supports that research. If you are invested in your job, you will be less likely to find workday distractions and feel a personal responsibility to succeed in your tasks. Your productivity will increase almost effortless.

2) Employee Satisfaction

Engaged employees are also more satisfied with their current positions, which leads to internal marketing advantages. Depending on your industry, you may benefit significantly from brand advocates who tout the benefits of your company to potential customers online and during networking sessions. Not surprisingly, employees are significantly more likely to act as these types of brand advocates if they are happy at their jobs and with their employers.

On average, employees have 10 times more social connections than your company’s brand pages. As a result, employees who are brand advocates due to their engagement can play a significant part in helping your company promote its services to potential customers. Brand advocacy on its own comes with a number of advantages, and employee satisfaction helps you achieve these points.

3) Lower Employee Turnover

Naturally, employees who are satisfied with their job are less likely to leave and go elsewhere. As a result, companies with high employee engagement also experience lower than average staff turnover. In fact, one study found that the turnover rates drop between 25% and 63% depending on the industry.

Employee satisfaction and low turnover combine to turn your organization toward a desirable state: becoming an employer of choice. Companies in the 21st century have recognized that they have to compete for the best talent in their industry, and have begun to engage in marketing initiatives designed specifically to enhance their employer brand.

Showcasing your low turnover rate and a high degree of employee satisfaction, both results of employee engagement, are equally beneficial in helping your company become an employer of the best talent in your industry.

4) High Degrees of Creativity

Another crucial benefit of employees who are engaged in their work and your company is the increased level of creativity and innovation. No company can succeed without consistently improving their products and processes, and employee engagement can be a crucial cog in the innovation wheel.

As your workers’ personal goals and passions become aligned with that of your organization, they will become more innovative in creating solutions that benefit your customers and ultimately your bottom line. They now have a vested interest in helping your business succeed, and will work to realize their full creative potential.

One core reasons engagement and creativity are so closely linked is an increased desire for collaboration. While unhappy employees tend to isolate themselves and their work, their engaged counterparts seek out co-workers within their team and in other departments to optimize their work and maximize their potential. Innovation and collaboration are naturally linked, which is why engaged employees tend to showcase high degrees of creativity and innovation potential.

5) Workplace Safety

Workplace safety is a crucial part of any organization’s employee philosophy, but its relationship to employee engagement often gets overlooked. In fact, research has shown engaged employees to be up to 5 times less likely to have a safety incident related to their workplace than their nonengaged counterparts.

According to one scholar, the reason for this remarkable statistic is surprisingly simple. As Jim Harter Ph.D., a chief scientist at Gallup Research, explains,

Engaged employees are more attentive and vigilant. They look out for the needs of their coworkers and the overall enterprise, because they personally ‘own’ the result of their work and that of the organization. [They] continuously recreate jobs so that each person has a chance to do what they do best, (…) listen to the opinions of people close to the action (close to actual safety issues and quality or defect issues), and help people see the connection between their everyday work and the larger purpose or mission of the organization.

Considering the collaborative and vigilant behavior of engaged employees, the safety benefits become clear.

6) Home and Work Integration

Workers who are invested in their work and employer are more likely to integrate their home and work life. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship: while employees have a vested interest in keeping their home life happy and healthy, employers feel similarly about their workers’ time on the job. Employee engagement helps workers achieve their goal while active efforts from employees to protect and value their staff’s time away from the job increases engagement.

7) Increased Revenue

Finally, never underestimate the financial benefit of keeping your employees engaged. Thanks to the benefits above, a workforce that is personally invested in your company and their work will ultimately help your businesses bottom line.

In fact, research firm Watson Wyatt found that companies with high degrees of employee engagement generate revenues that are on average 26% higher than their counterparts. And there is a causal relationship to this figure, as rises in employee engagement typically precede increases in revenue.

In other words, getting your employees to become engaged carries with its several benefits. But none is more important than the increased revenue, which will help your organization survive and thrive even in the most competitive work environments. But just how do you get to high levels of employee engagement? That topic merits an article on its own, but here is a great slide show by agencyEA on the subject and some more pointers below:



Boosting Your Employee Engagement

  • Involve employees in decision-making. If your workers feel that they have a say in the company’s operations, they’ll be much more likely to become personally invested in their work.
  • Provide work-life balance. As mentioned above, only employees who feel like they are not being exploited and still have time for their private life will commit to their job.
  • Set up and manage collaborative spaces. Collaboration is key in both innovation and engagement, and providing your employees with spaces in which they can easily and successfully work with others can help get you there.
  • Communicate frequently and more efficiently. Open lines of communication to achieve the perception that your workers know what’s going on even at the highest levels, making them more likely to become invested and brand advocates.
  • Ask for feedback. If your employees are not happy with any aspect of your company, they need to be able to tell management about it. Otherwise, the ill will may fester and spread to employees. Feedback that is addressed swiftly and comprehensively, on the other hand, is a sure way to higher employee engagement.

You may think of many of these engagement-boosting tips to be difficult to implement. But in fact, many of them have a common theme: open lines of communication. If you can implement a system that helps your workforce communicate with each other and higher levels of management, you will see your employee engagement rates rise and begin to take advantage of the above benefits. To learn more about how an intranet can help your employee communication abilities, contact us today.

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