Engage for Success

Engage for Success

Over the last month, we have seen the launch of the new Engage for Success website http://www.engageforsuccess.org/ . The initiative is driven by a number of key CEOs supported by vital contributions from across industry sectors, as well as a range of task and community groups; their key objective being to encourage businesses to unlock potential within employees and thus create growth for organisations and Britain as a whole.

They do this by:

  • Raising awareness of employee engagement
  • Equipping people to develop and deploy employee engagement approaches
  • Evidencing points of view and providing practical ideas and tools for action
  • Providing access to and support from like-minded communities

There are some fascinating facts and figures about engagement in the UK

  • Only about one third of UK workers say they are engaged
  • The UK is ranked ninth for engagement levels across the 12 largest economies of the world (Kenexa 2009).
  • In 2011 output per hour in the UK was 15 percentage points below average for the rest of the G7 industrialised nations.
  • On an output per worker basis, UK productivity was 20 percentage points lower than the rest of the G7 in 2011.

(Engage for Success, 2012)

So is there a correlation between employee engagement and productivity?

An interesting question given that Kenexa have established through analysis that if engagement levels in the UK rose to the middle of the top quartile, this would correlate with a £25.8bn increase in GDP.

And does it matter?

Apart from the impact on productivity, profits and competitive advantage, engagement should matter to organisations for a number of reasons:

  • Engaged employees are proud of their work and their organisation.  They will tell others which in turn drives the concept of ‘employer of choice’ and thus aids recruitment as well as retention.
  • Engaged employees go the extra mile and so their organisation is able to maximize its resources.
  • Engagement is contagious and so is the opposite. Disengaged employees impact on people they come into contact with within the organisation and so can spread, ultimately affecting motivation, output and relationships.

Four common themes

Research undertaken by Engage for Success (2012) has uncovered four common themes – enablers for engagement – that provide a starting point for organisations to evaluate the effectiveness of their approach to employee engagement:

  • Visible, empowering leadership that provides clarity about the organisation, where it’s come from and where it’s going.
  • Engaging managers who focus their people and give them scope, treat their people as individuals and coach and stretch them.
  • An employee voice throughout the organisation that reinforces and challenges views, both internally and externally, employees are seen as central to the solution.
  • Organisational integrity – values that are reflected in day to day behaviours. There is no ‘say –do’ gap.

Is your organisation an ambassador for Employee Engagement?  To what extent does it reflect the four Employee Engagement enablers?

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