Every year, businesses are spending almost $700 billion dollars in an effort to improve employee engagement, yet you’ll get wildly inconsistent answers if you ask business leaders what that means. Researchers, consultants, and leaders have been struggling to define employee engagement for decades. These definitions range from the simple idea of “discretionary effort” (which we'll get into) to the truly insane “complex nomological network encompassing trait, state, and behavioral constructs”.
This causes a large problem in the industry because there are still signs that engagement (whatever it is) needs to be clearly defined in order to gain the necessary results. In a Gallup survey, for instance, organizations whose employees reported high engagement had 25% to 65% less attrition than their peers (depending on the national average for low to high turnover organizations). They also performed well in productivity and customer satisfaction.
So defining engagement in a clear and precise way isn’t just a philosophical practice. It has bottom-line benefits.
This first episode helps paint the picture of employee engagement on the canvas of people analytics in the attempt to not only achieve more results, but to create a culture where employees thrive and are ultimately happy.
Join us on further episodes where we meet with industry experts, HR data scientists, and cutting-edge leaders to get to the bottom of what, truly, is employee engagement.
