Engaged employees outperform their non-engaged coworkers. Once viewed with some skepticism, that statement is now widely accepted as fact. A growing body of evidence over the past decade validates the quantifiable relationship between levels of organizational engagement and financial performance.
Additionally, Willis Towers Watson research has identified other critical factors that play important roles in driving productivity and results. Employers can build a workplace in which engagement combines with enablement and energy to open the door wider to significant performance improvement.
Engagement: the next generation
Willis Towers Watson has been studying employee engagement — and the
organizational elements that drive it — for more than a decade, and we
work with organizations across industries and around the world to measure
and improve it.
Through our client work and global workforce studies, we can readily
correlate high engagement with better financial metrics. For example, in a
three-year study of 41 global companies, we found that operating margins
improved nearly 4% on average in organizations with high employee
engagement levels and declined about 2% in those with low engagement
levels. These results have been corroborated by other studies.
Because of evidence like this, measuring engagement has become very
popular. The engagement metric appears on business scorecards in many
organizations as a critical measure of human capital performance. And a
number of companies use increases in engagement as specific goals for
the CEO and his or her direct reports.