Employee engagement programmes have a number of benefits for an organisation, including better relationships or a greater sense of empathy; building a culture of feedback and action leading to higher engagement scores; enabling more effective communication between leadership and employees; and generating feedback that can enhance the overall employee lifecycle.
However, these benefits can be hard to quantify. For example, how do you quantify an improved culture once this has been measured? Or how do you quantify strategy alignment between leadership and the team?
The main metric that can demonstrate ROI from an employee engagement programme is reduced employee turnover. This metric is widely tracked and understood by both HR and the executive. By making employees more productive and happier at work, we can improve retention, performance, and overall company financial returns.
Multiple global studies place the total cost of losing a full-time employee as 1.5X of their annual salary. In a large company, this can mean millions of dollars per annum lost to bad turnover. It is not surprising that employers of choice that enjoy low turnover, are typically the most successful companies overall. When assessing the cost of deploying an employee engagement platform, it would also be well advised considering the null-hypothesis – which can lead to potentially business crippling staff turnover.
Here are a few thought-provoking statistics: 82% of employees would consider leaving their job for a more empathetic organization and 78% of employees would work longer hours for a more empathetic employer. 64% of staff globally are not feeling quite so engaged at work, and when it comes to millennials (who make up 50% of the overall workforce) 21% report switching jobs in the last year, and only 29% feel engaged in their workplace.
Our employee engagement platform is built to derive ROI. Giving a voice to the employees to express themselves in their own words, on their own terms. Sophisticated text analytics, not available with legacy survey tools, allows for powerful sentiment analysis which in turn allows users to spot and solve potential areas of attrition before they become a problem. This in turn means we can correlate resolution of those issues using our Action Connect tool. Impact can be seen immediately in engagement metrics and in turn tracked against retention, absenteeism and other ‘hard’ company metrics.
As we move up and out of the current pandemic and as history tells us, when the economy booms once again those employees that are not happy or engaged will indeed leave for greener pastures. Now is a great time to start listening to your people and taking positive action to be a better place to work.
If you would like more information on our Employee Experience solution, visit our website.