Employees’ Engagement Too Sensitive for Organizational Growth- Accenture

Accenture has pointed out that for organizations to have utmost productivity and business growth, there must be high level of employee engagement that starts with employee satisfaction through incentives that keeps them happy which is the secret to a profitable and viable company.

According to Mrs. Ronke Akpata, human resources, Accenture, employees’ engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed emotionally to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.

She said productivity will follow a greater satisfaction in the workplace, as employees would have most of their needs meet in a holistic manner and be much more productive for the organization as well is willing to go that extra mile.

However,  with  the previous point met,  it is easier to retain  well-motivated employees which is key to long term business success as they would help to uphold the  culture in place and optimize the  training and skills acquisition expenditure.

It will also reduce cost of employees turnover and acquisition, as those with lower engagement are four times more likely to leave their jobs than those who are highly engaged.

Akpata further pointed out that employee engagement does not mean his happiness and that a global workforce study by Mr. Towers Perrin highlighted five key areas that could increase employee engagement.

It specified that the organisation is the most powerful influencer of employee engagement, that the structure of management systems and process greatly affects the level of a worker’s interest in his or her job, as the organisation must ensure it has employees with the right skills.

Other areas noted shows that there is no single "right model" for a high-performance culture, that the most effective approach depends on an organisation's strategic priorities and to  avoid a "one-size-fits-all" approach to influencing workplace attitudes; that employees are eager to invest more of themselves to help the company succeed, but want to understand what’s in it for them.

Also, that senior leaders need to make the leap to a more inspirational and engaging style of leadership to help drive higher engagement, that the more management makes an honest and meaningful effort to connect and motivate workers, the more they will feel connected to the company's objectives; and lastly, companies need to understand their employees as well as they understand their customers.

However, a survey to prove that employee engagement actually works was conducted by Gallup in 2012, on its eighth meta-analysis on the Q12 using 263 research studies across 192 organizations in 49 industries and 34 countries which include countries in emerging markets such as Nigeria, Ghana, Algeria, Morocco, Kenya and Zimbabwe in addition to China, India and Brazil.

The survey was based on the key elements of employee engagement and nine performance outcomes which includes Absenteeism, turnover for high and low turnover organisations, customer ratings, profitability, productivity, safety incidents, shrinkage (theft), patient safety incidents and quality (defects).

The survey is reflective of similar studies on employee engagement, showing with consistency that an engaged workforce will be about 12% more productive, the study also found that high-engagement firms grow their earnings-per-share (EPS) at a faster rate of 28%, while low-engagement firms experienced an average EPS growth rate decline of 9.4%.

Additionally, organizations in the bottom quartile of employee engagement had 62% more accidents than organizations in the top engagement quartile.

With an engaged workforce, organizations in the top quartile can look forward to superior performance: 21% higher productivity, 22% higher profitability, 10% higher customer metrics (customer satisfaction), 37% lower absenteeism, Between 25%-65% lower turnover, 28% less shrinkage, 48% fewer safety incidents, 41% fewer patient safety incidents, 41% fewer quality incidents (defects) along the nine performance outcomes.

On ways to improve employee's engagement, Akpata stated that organisations needs to seek feedback from employees about what matters to them; select the right managers for the task; coach managers and hold them accountable for their employees' (colleagues) engagement; define engagement goals in realistic, everyday terms and to bring engagement to life, leaders must make engagement goals meaningful to employees' day-to-day experiences.