Why isn’t employee engagement a key factor in a business?

Having engaged employees can save you and your business time and money. Keeping your employees engaged is a great investment and should be paramount to your business. In order to ensure your employees are as engaged as possible you must put a plan in place. Without a plan for this your employees could feel demotivated and encourage feelings of insecurity, which can in turn impact their work. Motivating already disengaged employees can be tough especially if they are already having feelings of insecurity at work.

We find that candidates will usually leave a role due to feelings that they are not appreciated, they have poor relationships with managers, lack of growth opportunities or that they are no longer interested in working for the company. Despite this, many companies still feel as if focusing on employee engagement strategies is a waste of time and do not measure employee engagement in an adequate way. There is evidence which does suggest that a good strategy not only leads to better retention but also more sales due to the increased productivity in the workforce.

Do you know how your employees feel about coming to work? Understanding how your employees feel about work, the company and the people they work with can be really beneficial to you. Even if you are measuring employee engagement, you may not be doing it in the most beneficial way. 98% of attendees of our recent employee engagement seminar did not feel as if they had an adequate strategy in place. Often the engagement strategies will only work if it is really supported by the senior leadership team and because many businesses are still very sceptical of the benefits of a good employee engagement strategy it can be difficult to get senior leadership on board.

The cost of an engagement strategy will be minimal in comparison to the costs of losing employees through disengagement. The opportunity cost of not having an employee in a role can have a huge impact which will then lead to further spend on hiring new employees due to training costs, loss of productivity of the team and loss of engagement. These reasons combined can really impact the company culture. Engaged employees are more likely to go the extra mile at work and work harder. With a competitive market, it is already difficult to find suitable employees and therefore, it is also hard to retain them. Having and delivering an employee engagement strategy is a great way to ensure you retain your top talent and save time and money in the process.