Large employers are doing a bit better at engaging their workforce. But substantial challenges remain if these major players are to truly shift their employees from disengaged to highly engaged.
Customer experience consultant Temkin Group elicited in-depth information from 200 large employers in an effort to determine how engaged their workers were. In reviewing the results and comparing it to a similar 2014 study, Temkin found a slight shift toward the light in engagement.
But, it concluded, engagement remains a science in its infancy. Even employers that measure engagement often don't see acting on the results as an imperative. Far too many are reporting engagement levels in the "danger" zone, and that's undercutting productivity and causing companies to fail to fulfill their potential.
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"Companies don't focus enough on cultivating what is likely their most precious asset, employees," states Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group. "It's great to see companies improving their employee engagement efforts, but there's still a lot of untapped opportunities."
Temkin ranks engagement by five levels, roughly poor through excellent. It's played around with naming the categories, but essentially engagement looked like this the past two years, with Level One the strongest engagement and Level 5 the weakest:
2014 2015
Level One 5 percent 3 percent
Level Two 14 percent 16 percent
Level Three 14 percent 25 percent
Level Four 47 percent 37 percent
Level Five 20 percent 19 percent
The survey showed a strong shift toward Level Three, described in this year's survey as the "maintaining" engagement level. But the top ranking actually lost ground.
Other results of the survey:
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69 percent of large companies measure employee engagement at least annually, but only 45 percent of companies have executives that treat taking action on the results as a high priority.
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The most common obstacle to success identified by respondents is the lack of a clear employee engagement strategy.
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72 percent of the companies with higher engagement have above average customer experience compared with 48 percent of the other companies.
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75 percent had better financial performance than their competitors' compared with 50 percent of companies with lower employee engagement maturity.
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Executives in companies with higher employee engagement efforts are almost 3.5 times more likely to treat taking action on employee engagement studies as a high priority.
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Companies with higher engagement efforts are more than twice as likely to have their customer experience and HR organizations work together on their employee engagement efforts.
The report, Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity, 2015, is available for sale through Temkin's website.
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
