Employee Engagement! Is it worth to try?

The huge cost of disengaged employees…!

The process of finding new talents with required skills is still the most time-consuming tasks for organisations and HR departments. These days, business owners ought to understand their employees expectation and engagement level, while  their employees are the essential parts of the organisations. On the other hand, as researches show, many employees do not feel engaged in their works. Gallup(Nink, M. (2016)) reported that 84% of employees in Germany, 70% in the United States, and 87% of all employees globally are not engaged in their jobs and disengagement cost organisations a lot:

  • Actively disengaged employees cost the German economy from 75.6 billion to 99.2 billion euros annually in lost productivity.
  • The economic damage caused by workers who are not engaged is an estimated additional cost to the economy of 139.1 billion to 187.9 billion euros.
  • Turnover, which often follows long-term disengagement, can cost organisations as high as 1.5 times of the employee’s annual salary.

What is meant by Employee Engagement?

The term of employee engagement is firstly called as personal engagement by Kahn (1990) at work. Furthermore, employee engagement is defined as the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural energy an employee directs toward positive organisational outcomes(Shuck & Wollard, 2010).

Meaningfulness, safety, availability, job enrichment, role fit, rewarding co-worker and supportive supervisor are significantly related to employee engagement.

A sustainable workload, feelings of choice and control, appropriate recognition and reward, a supportive work community, fairness and justice, and meaningful and valued work are the important factors of creating job engagement and satisfaction(DR May, 2004).

Why employee engagement matters?

Employee engagement drives business success. In a global report from HR consultancy Tower Perrins in 2016, based on surveys of over 600,000 staff members in a wide range of industries:

Companies with high levels of employee engagement improved 19.2 percent in operating income while companies with low levels of employee engagement declined 32.7 percent over the study period.”  

In addition engaged employees have 20% better performance, 41% less absenteeism and 17% better productivity(Gallup report). Furthermore, research has suggested that engaged employees are more likely to be productive, remain with their current employer, and interact positively with customers.

Can the employee engagement surveys solve the problem?

Typically the process of understanding the employee engagement level has been manual. Managers and HR survey the employees annually or quarterly to investigate the hidden problems of engagement and motivation. But they still require a long time to analysis the survey results and find out the problems. Discovering the feasible solutions based on the investigated problems for each employee and team are also the other time-consuming tasks for HR departments. Even supposing some aspect of the effort like doing the survey is automated, but it is not still based on personalisation and customised solution recommendations. The existing employee engagement systems may collect survey data from employees about their engagement level and expectations, but the ability to effectively analyse the data and provide a real-time required solution for each employee based on what they need in that situation  are still missing.

What is our proposed solution for having more engagement?

Today’s jobs have changed so much that employees require a different kind of motivations and engagement. The process of finding new talents with required skills is really time-consuming. So keeping them motivated, using their skills well, recommending them to improve in their field, and retaining them are necessary  to competitive advantage, or even a requirement for survival of the businesses. Research also has reliably suggested that organisations stand to benefit positively from the development of high levels of employee engagement.

In our newborn employee engagement platform ComeMit, we have implemented the most important aspects of employee engagement in one place. With the power of AI, our engagement platform would learn from the previous patterns of employee engagement and disengagement, determine a baseline of most important engagement factors for each characteristic and will propose the best possible engagement solutions to the employees and managers at the same time. We are now offering free test phaSe for middle size companies, so don’t hesitate to contact us for knowing more about our AI-based platform and the testing phase.