Employee Engagement - What Does It Take To Foster A Truly Engaged Workforce?
People Matters|April 2017

Employee engagement is not a straight-line process – from behavioral metrics to motivation – there are many factors to be considered while designing the right engagement strategies. In this Cover Story, employee engagement thoughtleaders give us their perspectives on what they think will be the core differentiators in employee engagement practices.

Suparna Chawla Bhasin & Udayan Dhar
Employee Engagement - What Does It Take To Foster A Truly Engaged Workforce?

Employee Engagement remains the elusive El Dorado for businesses and human resource professionals who are continuously trying to capitalize on their available talent. Sadly though, global surveys by organizations like Gallup and CEB have consistently presented discouraging results.

Gallup in fact calls it the “global employee engagement crisis”. The numbers definitely indicate that. According to their 2016 survey, 87 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged at work. This is the reality even when the financial returns of an engaged workforce is evident. Gallup’s research goes on to reveal that companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share. Companies in the top quartile in employee engagement outperformed bottom-quartile units by 10 percent on customer ratings, 22 percent in profitability, and 21 percent in productivity. They also saw significantly lower turnover (25 percent in high-turnover organizations, 65 percent in low-turnover organizations), shrinkage (28 percent), and absenteeism (37 percent) and fewer safety incidents (48 percent), patient safety incidents (41 percent), and quality defects (41 percent).

So, why do most organizations find employee engagement a challenge and what can they do about it? This is the question we asked a host of employee engagement experts globally. The insights they shared had some prominent themes that all organizations need to keep in mind while designing their employee engagement strategies.

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This story is from the April 2017 edition of People Matters.

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This story is from the April 2017 edition of People Matters.

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