New Information That Is More of the Same

The following is from the article Alternatives to 360 Assessments: The Manager's Role in the February issue of Talent Management magazine. I find their new(ish) set of statistics regarding employee engagement and its effects interesting. Thought you might like to see it.

The challenge for businesses is clear: To get and maintain a competitive edge, organizations must not only attract customers, they must attract and engage the most talented employees. The quality of the relationship between managers and direct reports defines an employee's level of engagement, discretionary effort and loyalty to the company.

People do not leave organizations; they leave managers. The quality of manager-employee relationships depends on the quality of the management practices each manager uses. Talented employees will look for greener pastures when they have to endure deficient managers who:

• Poorly articulate job expectations.
• Employ vague, inadequate standards and
• measurements of performance.
• Utilize faulty, manipulative motivation techniques.
• Tolerate poor performance.
• Are ineffective communicators and are rigid in their coaching styles.

It is the manager alone who is the greatest catalyst for exceptional employee performance. The evidence can't be any clearer. A recent global workforce study of 90,000 employees in 19 countries conducted by global professional services firm Towers Perrin showed:

• Just 21 percent of the employees surveyed around the world are engaged in their work, meaning they're willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed.
• Some 38 percent of employees are partly to fully disengaged. The result: a gap between the discretionary effort companies need and people actually want to invest, and companies' effectiveness in channeling this effort to enhance performance.
• Firms with the highest percentage of engaged employees collectively increased operating income 19 percent and earnings per share 28 percent year to year.
• Those companies with the lowest percentage of engaged employees showed year-to-year declines of 33 percent in operating income and 11 percent in earnings per share.

Employee Engagement is now more than a buzzphrase, and the more evidence of its effects (and the negative effects of its absence) the more buzz it will continue to create.

Comments

[Michael Lee Stallard]

Great information Tim. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.

[Brian Oates]

If there's something to do we've got a spreadsheet, computer program or methodology to do it. Engagement however, is almost a 'soft' skill, which in the end has much more value than we often realize... and articles like this that bring it back into perspective.

[Tim Wright]

Brian -

I'm sure it's obvious that I view "employee engagement" as broad set of soft skills that are plenty hard to manifest.

A really successful EE effort begins at the cultural level. And that takes time and commitment. I/O/W, it really takes a form of true engagement by the organization's leader(s). From there it moves to the requisite engagement (of a slightly different sort but no less critical) by the management team.

Nothing easy about EE, but plenty of value that makes it worth the effort.

Tim