8 Facts that Prove the Value of Employee Engagment

One of the things that I have been learning to do is ‘dollarise’ the value of the product that we offer when talking to customers.  Since we deal in employee engagement, here are some great stats to keep in mind.  Some of these come out of the UK – I actually got these from a KPMG research article.  The last stat on safety came from a different study.

1. Tower Perrins’ 2006 global survey  found that companies with highly-engaged employees had a near 52% gap in performance improvement in operating income, compared with companies whose employees had low engagement scores. Companies with high levels of employee engagement improved 19.2% in operating income while companies with low levels of employee engagement declined 32.7% over the study period. (towers perrin-iSr (2006) The ISR Employee Engagement Report)

2. Employees in the UK take an average of 2.69 sick days per year; the disengaged take 6.19 (gallup, 2003, cited in Melcrum (2005), Employee Engagement: How to Build A High Performance Workforce

3. The CBI reported that sickness absence costs the uk economy £13.4bn a year ( cBi-axa (2007), Annual Absence and Labour Turnover Survey)

4. 70% of engaged employees indicate they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs; only 17% of non-engaged employees say the same (right Management (2006), Measuring True Employee Engagement, A CIPD Report)

5. Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave the organisation than the disengaged.  (corporate leadership council, corporate executive Board (2004)’driving performance and retention through employee engagement: a quantitative analysis of effective engagement strategies’)

6. 78% of engaged employees would recommend their company’s products or services, against 13% of the disengaged (gallup, 2003, cited in Melcrum (2005), Employee Engagement: How to Build A High Performance Workforce)

7. Companies with both highly aligned cultures and highly aligned innovation strategies have 17% higher profit growth than companies with low degrees of alignment (Strategy + Business: The Global Innovation 1000: Why Culture Is Key, Oct 2011)

8. A meta-analysis undertaken by Harter et al. (2009) found that the top 25% of business units (in terms of engagement) have 49% less safety incidents than the bottom 25%. Similarly, the same study found that in health settings, the most engaged organisations have 41% less patient safety incidents (i.e. falls, medical errors, infection rates, and risk-adjusted mortality rates).