Hay Group India Blog
We’ve all heard the one about the CEO who was asked how many people worked in his organisation. “Oh, about half of them,” he replied.
Joking aside, how true is this within your organisation? If you don’t know chances are it’s not being measured or at least not being measured in a way that gives you the same top line data such as profit, debt days outstanding and units shipped. It’s interesting that many organisations just don’t know, even when perhaps half of their salary bills, their biggest costs, are going on people either not contributing
– what we call non-engaged – or, worse still, those who are actually pushing in the wrong direction. In other words, actively disengaged.
After all, who needs competitors if you’ve got actively disengaged employees on your payroll?
All of our research shows that employees want to work and want to work hard, it’s what human beings naturally want to do. That’s the good news. Given that the vast majority of us want to work, what then is the driving force behind those that want to work in the same direction as the employer and those that don’t? That’s the question a good engagement study seeks to answer. And the answers matter. A well aligned workforce results in better bottom-line performance. It delivers higher scores on pretty much any business critical key performance indicators you care to mention, whether they be profit, innovation, safety or anything else. It also means comparatively better share performance.
To the question of whether employee engagement matters to the CEO the answer is undoubtedly ‘yes’. Highly engaged workers make for better business outputs, more loyal customers, fewer ‘problems’ and better financial performance. What’s not to like?
