Over the past year or so we’ve blogged about many aspects of employee engagement. The infographic below pulls together some of the employee engagement statistics that we’ve found along the way. It is clear that employee engagement has a direct impact on service, sales, quality, safety, retention, profits and total shareholder returns. The decision to be engaged is made in workers hearts, not in their minds. Disengaged employees are definitely bad for business. 
Key Employee Engagement Statistics
The Importance of Employee Engagement
- Engagement improves service, sales, quality, safety, retention, profits and total shareholder returns.
- Good communication is at the heart of higher engagement levels.
- The decision to be engaged is made in workers’ hearts, not minds.
The State of Engagement
- Engagement levels are the lowest since 2000.
- 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged.
- Employee engagement is the lowest it’s been in eight years.
Trust, Management, and Leadership
- Where leaders model the desired behavior, employees are 55 percent more engaged.
- Employees that feel like their supervisors are supportive are 67 percent more engaged.
Profitability
Companies with 22 percent higher profitability than those businesses with low engagement rates.- Companies are losing 20 to 25 percent of their revenue each year due to disengaged employees.
- Companies that have 60 to 70 percent of their employees engaged had an average total shareholder’s return (TSR) of 24.2 percent.
- Just a five percent increase in total employee engagement resulted in a 0.7 percent increase in a company’s operating margin.
- 60 to 70 percent of their employees engaged had an average total shareholder’s return (TSR) of 24.2 percent.
- When engagement dropped to 49 to 60 percent, TSR fell to 9.1 percent.
- Companies with less than 25 percent of their employees engaged had a negative TSR.
- Highly engaged organizations have double the rate of success over lower engaged companies.
Customer Satisfaction
- Companies with highly engaged employees have a 10 percent higher customer satisfaction rating.
Productivity
- Employees who are committed to and enthusiastic about their work are 43% more productive than employees who considered it ‘just work’ or were unhappy in their position.
- A simple activity like naming an employee of the month can drastically raise their productivity and strengthen their emotional connection with their work.
- Companies with highly engaged employees have a 21 percent higher productivity
- The biggest driver for employee engagement was ‘a sense of feeling valued and involved.
Staff Turnover
- Employees are 87 percent less likely to leave an organization than the disengaged.
- Companies with high employee engagement experience lower than average staff turnover. Turnover rates drop between 25% and 63% depending on the industry.
- Companies with engaged workers experience: 65% less turnover (low-turnover organizations).
- Companies with engaged workers experience: 25% less turnover (high-turnover organizations).
Employee Safety
- Companies with engaged workers experience: 48% fewer safety incidents.
Quality Defects
- Companies with engaged workers experience: 41% fewer quality defects.
Sources / Further Reading
https://www.employment-studies.co.uk/report-summaries/report-summary-drivers-employee-engagement
https://www.fastcompany.com/3041948/why-engagement-happens-in-employeess-hearts-not-their-minds
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/09/04/why-employee-engagement/
https://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/12157/power-praise-recognition.aspx
https://www.gallup.com/poll/181289/majority-employees-not-engaged-despite-gains-2014.aspx
https://www.gallup.com/services/177047/q12-meta-analysis.aspx
https://www.gallup.com/services/169328/q12-employee-engagement.aspx
https://home.ubalt.edu/tmitch/642/Articles%20syllabus/Hay%20assoc%20engaged_performance_120401.pdf
https://hbr.org/2013/07/employee-engagement-does-more/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hate-work.html
If you are looking to improve employee engagement within your organization check out our employee engagement action plan or contact MyHub for a free consultation on how a company intranet can improve employee engagement within your business.
This info-graphic provides a lot of insights into why employee management is important and what are the aspects that have to be considered while companies try to understand the engagement levels of their employees.
The statistics are meaningless, or they mean what you want them to mean. For example, the difference between the business performance of companies with higher engagement levels and those with lower engagement levels, what point are you making? to make? The one that is most logical is that better-performing companies are better because they have better leadership, better management, better products, better marketing and better sales. Antidotally, because they are successful their employees score higher on engagement. Employee engagement is the result of the success, not the cause of the success. If you’re Gallup or some other employee engagement involved entity, then obviously you read these stats as the engagement caused the better performance. If you think about it, the former is far more likely than the latter. The whole EE business is based on similar statistics that are conveniently interpreted as favoring the EE industry. I suspect that is why the EE needle hasn’t moved in twenty years. EE purveyors are your ultimate source for snake oil supplies. If you think I’m being overly negative, try to find a single study, book, whitepaper, marketing piece detailing the success of an EE initiative that actually improved the business’ financial performance. There are none! So, the statistics from Gallup, the Hay group, AON Hewitt et al serve only one purpose and that is the sustainability of the EE services industry. Again, where are the results, how many services firms will base their fees on the results they deliver? Rhetorical of course. I predict that 2018 will be the year the EE industry’s near total lack of results will come to the attention of CEO’s, and as a result, the bar to sell EE will be much higher, as it should be. Full disclosure, we’re in the EE services business, however, we put 75% of our fees at risk against our approach of CEO sponsored EE initiatives where the income statement is actually improved, in some cases by hundreds of millions in only ten weeks exclusively from engaging employees. The $2 billion a year EE market is pretty much a waste of valuable resources until the measurements are based on a transformation taking place, not just an activity.
Hi Jim, thank you for your comment. I do think you raise some interesting and valid points that are very important. Initially, I thought that you were being a little bit overly negative, but then I headed over to your site and saw the line “Get the politics, culture and silos out of the way and they’ll shock you with the results.” Very well said I thought and the angle that you present I think is worth giving some serious consideration to when weighing up how to put into practice a plan to increase employee engagement.