Improving Employee Engagement

Improving your revenues whilst reducing your employment costs must be some kind of eutopia right? Well if you focus on improving the engagement of your employees, then this combination of outcomes is very realistic indeed.

It’s an old adage, but who is most important, your customers or your employees? Well if you believe what Richard Branson says, then “customers do not come first, employees do. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers.”

At PDW Group, our significant experience and research says we agree wholeheartedly with this. Sadly though, the number of businesses who genuinely put employees before customers is much lower than it should be.

It’s probably obvious to most business owners and senior management in companies large and small, that happy and engaged employees are going to produce better performances and results than those who are less happy and less engaged.

Whilst this has always been a key principle, 2020 may well make this even more important than ever before.

Why is people engagement especially important in 2020 and beyond?

Well with unemployment at its lowest rate for many years, Brexit having an impact on available migrant labour, and European and worldwide businesses trying harder than ever to persuade people overseas - it has never been more important than now for UK businesses to retain their employee base.

As UK businesses are all vying for this top talent it’s essentially a ‘job seekers’ market where in many industries, sectors & regions of the UK, the demand for talent and commitment is way higher than the available pool of supply. So, it makes total sense therefore for employers to focus specifically on this opportunity, ensuring you retain the great people you have already got, and reap the rewards accordingly.

What exactly is employee engagement and how does this link to your revenue and costs?

People engagement is typically defined as a combination of three key areas, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. 

• Your employees are ‘satisfied’ with their employer and their job
• Your employees feel a loyalty to their employer, and intend to stay
• Your employees would recommend their employer to others as a great place to work

These three components are critical to reducing unnecessary costs and maximising your revenue opportunities.

But why is this?

Well engaged employees are significantly more productive, take much less unnecessary time off and are much more likely to be proactive and go the extra mile than less engaged ones. They are also much less likely to leave your business…and let’s face it, having to recruit to fill a vacancy that could easily have been avoided is distracting, frustrating and often costly. 

Just think about what happens when a person starts to become disengaged and where the costs begin to mount up. It often starts with a loss of productivity that steadily gets worse, sometimes with more frequent ‘absence’. The person then hands their notice in, and their mind is now firmly on their new employer and new job, not their current one. You then have the cost and hassle of a vacancy, maybe for weeks or even months, with potentially significant implications for other employees, customers, and suppliers.

You will almost certainly have both the direct and indirect cost of recruiting and selecting a replacement, and possibly having to pay more for the new person than their predecessor. 

Then there’s an induction to create & manage, and then many months whilst the person learns and builds their knowledge to be even as good as the predecessor.

You get the gist…so what have you gained? Well your new employee may well be great, but it’s most likely just cost your business thousands of pounds, often when it didn’t have to.

So what should you do?

There are numerous components to improving employee engagement and it’s certainly not about just paying people more money. A great place to start is to find out where your starting point is and robustly measure your current engagement levels - seeking to understand how your workforce actually feels about their employer. 

You can then easily compare these insights with UK and industry benchmarks and find out if you do indeed have an engagement issue, and if so, how big a problem it is and what are some of the solutions to improve it and reduce its impact.

If you’d like to look into finding out and measuring engagement in your business, PDW Group can help.