The Value of an Engagement Solution

In this section, we'll be talking about the value of a Engagement solution for your organization. Please review all the following sections carefully. Each of the chapters are broken down into separate articles, which are linked in the table of contents below.

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• 41% reduction in absenteeism
• 17% increase in productivity
• 24-59% reduction in turnover

However, US companies are much more likely to have a disengaged workforce. And disengaged employees cost US businesses up to $550 billion a year due to lost productivity.

CEOs and HR leaders have spent years and millions of dollars trying to boost employee engagement at their companies. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach for improving engagement, one thing is true -- it is crucial to measure and track employee sentiment over time. With a company baseline, you can better assess dips and gains in engagement. You can also compare your score to that of similar companies to give you a deeper understanding on your company’s engagement and opportunities for improvement.

Engagement surveys clearly provide crucial data to help drive company policies, programs, and culture in the right direction. They also help key stakeholders make informed business decisions.

Engagement surveys provide powerful insights for company leadership and HR teams. With a detailed breakdown of company-wide engagement data, leaders and HR professionals can better understand:

• What’s contributing to, and what’s detracting from, employee engagement: Perhaps employees feel positively about leadership, but sentiment is low around career growth. With this knowledge, executives can make an informed decision to invest in a leadership training program.
  
  
• Which departments are most or least engaged: This initial insight will guide HR teams as they uncover more information on employee sentiment. For instance, if the sales team has low engagement, HR leaders can meet with sales members to better understand their engagement detractors. Conversely, if the product team has high engagement, HR can learn more about their department-wide efforts to see if they can be replicated across the company.
  
  
• The biggest engagement drivers: Every workforce is different. Some populations may care most about benefits, and others may care most about career growth. When leaders and HR teams uncover what is most important to their employees, they can focus on these crucial domains -- rather than wasting time and energy on low-impact initiatives.

In a similar vein, managers benefit from engagement insights for their individual teams. We recommend that managers benchmark their team against company-wide results to see how they’re faring versus the company average. Specifically, managers can benefit from evaluating their team against company-wide results for the following metrics:

• Team engagement score: Managers should evaluate their engagement score versus that of the company overall. If a sales manager has a highly-engaged workforce, the HR team can meet with the manager and his reps to understand what is working well for the team and see if it can be replicated across the org. Conversely, if there is a large discrepancy between sentiment on their team and company-wide sentiment, more investigation is needed to understand the underlying drivers and address them. 
  
  
• What’s contributing to, and what’s detracting from, employee engagement: If the sales manager sees that his team has much lower sentiment versus the entire company for work environment, he’ll know that changes are needed for his team. Maybe he needs to implement a work-from-home policy, or change daily stand-ups to weekly stand-ups, to improve the work culture on his team.