3 Reasons Why Employee Engagement Results in Corporate Success
In August 2016, employees of the San Francisco-based e-signature and digital transaction management company DocuSign ranked it among the top 50 privately held, cloud-based companies to work for. Glassdoor, a leading jobs and careers website where employees share insider information about the cultures, benefits, and drawbacks of a variety of companies, published the results.
DocuSign’s staff members gave their employer high marks for fostering a positive workplace environment and for making career advancement opportunities available. In fact, 91 percent of DocuSign’s employees in the Glassdoor ranking said they would recommend the company to others. The average Glassdoor favorability rating for the top 50 group of companies stands at 75 percent, yet DocuSign employees rated their company’s overall business prospects as greater than 90 percent favorable. DocuSign CEO Keith Krach earned a nearly perfect score in the same survey.
Experts have pointed out that employee ratings of companies can have a significant impact on investors’ decisions. Companies whose staff members show high levels of confidence in their employers’ leadership, and in their own prospects for advancement, tend to demonstrate higher levels of performance. This, in turn, results in their companies maintaining a greater market share and delivering to a greater extent on shareholder expectations.
As seen in a recent Forbes article, employee engagement does not necessarily mean employee satisfaction, which simply refers to a staff member’s basic contentment and commitment to showing up for work each day. The term “employee satisfaction” sets too low a threshold. “Happiness” isn’t the right word either. While parties and celebrations may boost employees’ personal happiness, these events won’t necessarily result in true engagement.
Instead, “engagement” refers to an employee’s emotional connection with a company, as well as his or her personal alignment with its goals. For example, an engaged employee is more likely to go the extra mile. He or she is more apt to pick up the phone to assist a customer at the end of a long day, or to seek out ways to bring new customers aboard, even if that is not part of the job description.
The understanding of the value of an engaged workforce is nothing new. The famous 19th-century industrialist Andrew Carnegie once observed that, if a company can earn the loyalty and high regard of its best employees, it will receive their best efforts and benefit from their desire to contribute their creativity and innovation.
A number of experienced entrepreneurs and business writers have noted that this focus on staff engagement should ideally be incorporated into a company at every level. Yet many businesses have not yet made a conscious effort to ensure that this happens. A recent Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study found that, while almost three-quarters of the more than 500 executives surveyed said that employee engagement is highly important to their success, only about one-quarter believed that their own staff members were highly engaged.
Here is a list of a few reasons why cultivating a culture of employee engagement produces long-term benefits for the companies that practice it:
1. Retention saves money
Employees who are happier at work are less likely to quit. With some $10 billion lost every year due to staff turnover, savvy employers know that holding on to their high performers will save them money in the long run.
Companies that show appreciation for their employees and a desire to maintain strong and mutually beneficial relationships tend to win out in economic climates that offer a high degree of mobility for talented people. By bolstering a culture of connection between leadership and front-line staff (and among staff at all levels), a company is investing in its own future security.
2. Increased engagement equals increased outputs
One recent study discovered that companies in the United States lose as much as $550 billion annually due to absenteeism and the costs of employee health problems and on-the-job accidents. Employers should take the long-range view by understanding that greater employee engagement offers the potential to make substantial inroads into reducing these kinds of costs.
A healthy level of employee engagement means that staff members, from the mailroom to the boardroom, feel closely connected and loyal to their employer. They also tend to have a superior understanding of the value of their work. Staff members who possess this kind of personal investment in the company they work for typically produce work that is qualitatively and quantitatively better.
3. Today’s workplace really is a glass door
In today’s environment of instantaneous social media connection, one discontented employee can make their negative impression go viral and global in just minutes. And because people are often far more likely to remember a negative comment than a positive one, this disengaged and disaffected staff member can quickly destroy a big chunk of the goodwill a company has carefully built up.
At the same time, an engaged and invested employee’s public praise of his or her employer can go a long way. The global public relations company Edelman recently released its annual Trust Barometer, which showed that large percentages of people across a number of countries and industries tend to place more trust in information coming from peers than from traditional sources such as the government and media.
