In my last post, I shared a few definitions of employee engagement that I like. In this post, I’d like to cover why Employee Engagement is important.
Benefits of Employee Engagement
A large scale survey by Gallup showed that organizations with highly engaged workforces get several major benefits:
- They enjoy 4x the success rate (in achieving desired outcomes) of organizations with very low employee engagement.
- They achieve higher customer loyalty.
- They enjoy higher productivity.
- And they achieve higher profitability.
This sounds amazing, but that’s not all!
- “High levels of engagement promote retention of talent, foster customer loyalty and improve organizational performance and stakeholder value.” (emphasis added)
Here are a couple of concrete examples from SHRM:
At beverage giant Molson Coors, highly engaged employees were five times less likely than nonengaged employees to have a safety incident and seven times less likely to have a lost-time safety incident. By strengthening employee engagement, the company saved $1,721,760 in safety costs in one year.
Construction-equipment maker Caterpillar’s increased employee engagement resulted in $8.8 million annual savings from decreased attrition, absenteeism and overtime in a European plant, and a $2 million increase in profit plus a 34 percent increase in highly satisfied customers in a start-up plant.
So there you have it! Improving employee engagement can benefit your organization in many important and tangible ways. And as a result, employee engagement is indeed very important.
