One Theory Why Worldwide Employee Engagement is so Low…

Most everyone knows the power of Employee Engagement:

When employees are more engaged, they invest more discretionary effort into their work.

When employees are more engaged, customers enjoy a better experience.

When employees are more engaged, customers become more loyal.

When employees are more engaged, revenues increase.
When employees are more engaged, profits increase.
When employees are more engaged, earnings per share increase.

According to Gallup’s recent study, world-wide, employee engagement levels are dismal. With all those big-time benefits, why don’t more companies take more effort to improve employee engagement?

Here’s the kicker:

Employee engagement can be improved without spending much money.

This recent article published by The Conference Board presents six of the many ways that a business can begin to improve employee engagement:

1. Tap into the talents people want to use
2. Demonstrate appreciation
3. Ask for input
4. Highlight successes
5. Offer opportunities to learn and grow
6. Provide honest, meaningful feedback

Most of those methods don’t necessarily require funding; they’re more about consciously doing more of the things that we ought to be doing in the first place – things like transparency, showing appreciation, and genuinely appealing to the human side of employees.

With documented benefits of employee engagement so high, and the costs of making it happen so low, we’re talking about an ROI that’s off the charts.

Why don’t more companies take these low-cost steps to driver greater employee engagement?

Here’s my theory:

Measuring the bottom-line benefits of increased employee engagement – customer loyalty, revenue growth and profitability – are easy; companies typically measure these.  But when it comes to measuring improvements in engagement itself, that’s where we fall  short.

A common yardstick of employee engagement is the AQPC annual census, which measures employee engagement once a year, as do many others.

We’re living in an age of immediacy; the answer to any question is a Google-search away, so the idea of having to wait an entire year to know if  your employee engagement initiatives are paying off is counter-intuitive to  today’s management mindset.

If there’s a method to measure employee engagement on a more regular basis – something that offers a more “instant gratification,” I suspect we’ll see more  engagement initiatives practiced with greater rigor and regularity, and world-wide employee engagement well-above today’s 13% level.

Do you know of a immediate way to measure engagement?