The difference between engaged and disengaged employees means everything for your business. From turnover rates to productivity, how well an organization engages its team members often correlates with its success.
Whether or not your employees already seem engaged in their work, understanding the importance of employee engagement strategies will help operations run as smoothly as ever!
Employee engagement is exactly what it sounds like! Most commonly, employee engagement defines the level at which your employees are engaged with their roles. Though, it’s also defined as an employee’s level of enthusiasm about their work or their willingness to contribute to company success. Most importantly, employee engagement relates to the level of connection and commitment an employee has to an organization.
Today, with such a high demand for great talent, it's more crucial than ever to have engaged, fulfilled employees. An organization that doesn’t adequately engage its teams risks losing valuable employees, creates a low morale work environment, and productivity dramatically declines. As a result, so does revenue!
Employee engagement doesn’t just impact the internal working environment of your organization, it also affects client and customer satisfaction, your public reputation, and even stakeholder value.
Therefore, employee engagement should be a top priority for your company if it isn’t already!
You may be thinking that employee engagement is the same thing as job satisfaction. And while they are related, there is a distinct difference. In general, engaged employees are proactive and even adapt to the needs of a role as it changes. Job satisfaction, on the other hand, often involves how content or gratified employees feel about their work.
The big distinction between the two is that job satisfaction is more closely related to the benefits an organization provides like pay, healthcare, or job security. Whereas employee engagement is tied closely to the relationship an employee has with their manager.
Employee engagement relates to how the daily communications between a leader and team member are handled. How much trust there is between employees and managers. And even the level of autonomy an employee has when completing assignments.
However, both the organization and its leaders contribute to employee engagement. When leaders strive to create a great workplace, genuinely value their team members, and the organization makes investments in their employees, organizations often improve their employee engagement.
On the leadership side, engaged employees have the resources they need to fulfill their work and have good working relationships with their managers.
As you can imagine, employee engagement is the backbone of an organization’s success.
Disengaged employees are much more likely to leave a company than engaged employees. Even if an employee feels satisfied in their role, employees are more likely to quit because of a boss or manager than the responsibilities of a position. Since organizational leaders have a direct impact on employee engagement, if your leaders aren’t equipped to engage their teams, you could face higher turnover.
On average, it’s estimated that replacing an employee costs anywhere from one-half to two times an employee’s annual salary. The longer the training and recruitment process takes, the more costs an organization is going to see.
Losing a highly valuable team member doesn’t just cost the initial fees of job boards and recruiters, it costs the company time. After a while, if a company has a reputation for having high turnover, it's less likely to attract quality hires and can end up in a never-ending cycle of recruitment, training, and then replacing employees.
On average, engaged employees can mean a 19% increase in operating income for your organization.
If you want to learn employee engagement strategies from industry experts, contact us today to get started.
