Employee Engagement – The Business Case for Improvement

Sir Terry Leahy in the November 2011 Personnel management Magazine identifies the four things an organisation has to provide employees in order for them to feel engaged.

• A job that interests them
• A chance to get on
• To be treated with respect
• To have a boss that helps them

As Sir Terry says in the article ‘it’s not a lot to ask’.  Yet it does seem to be something that organisations are struggling to improve. Part of this must come down to the way Leaders and Managers are trained. But at the moment a bigger barrier appears to be fears of job insecurity (PM Magazine, Anat Arkin). This is no great surprise, but it does make one wonder how leaders are reacting to the fear of losing their own jobs. This could potentially be making the situation worse. If leaders are pushing for reduced costs to maintain profitability there is a real risk that all Sir Terry’s principles could be badly compromised.

However it seems there are positive signs in that even in the Lloyds Banking Group the levels of staff engagement are holding up. The relevance of having strong engagement levels is reinforced by Tanith Dodge HR Director at Marks & Spencer. Staff engagement scores at the store group are at 75%, up by 2% on the prior year. Dodge states that the group find there is a strong correlation between the level of staff engagement in a store and the sales figures, absence rates and mystery shopper scores.

There are other businesses that have found similar links between staff engagement and other business measures. This was an important argument for paying attention to staff engagement in the book The Service Profit Chain published in 1997, written by James Heskett, Earl Sasser and Leonard Schlesinger. The book provides many examples of the same links between engagement and business results in some of the largest world and US companies.

It would appear therefore important for companies to pay attention to the way they train their future leaders such that they do understand the concept of staff engagement, how to improve it and the resultant business benefits. This could well be the difference in whether or not a business survives in these difficult economic times.