3 Business Reasons for Employee Engagement Programs
By Kate Olsen
Are there still people in your company who don’t understand the value of employee involvement programs?
Employee engagement is multi-dimensional and in addition to competitive benefits, mentorship, state of the art facilities etc., cause programs are hallmarks of the best workplaces. Here are the data points you need to make the business case for creating a holistic employee engagement strategy that includes community impact.
1) Productivity rises: Gallup performed a meta-analysis across 199 studies covering 152 organizations, 44 industries, and 26 countries – which was featured on the Harvard Business Review blog – and found that general productivity was 18% higher at companies where employees were more engaged than not.
2) Operating margins increase: According to the Towers Watson 2012 Global Workforce Study, companies with the highest sustainable engagement scores had an average one-year operating margin of 27% (vs. 14% for companies with traditional engagement and 10% for those with low engagement). [Sustainable engagement is defined as the intensity of employees’ connection to their organization, based on being engaged, being enabled, and feeling energized.]
3) The market rewards your stock: According to the Parnassus prospectus for its Workplace Fund (a portfolio of stocks of companies with outstanding workplaces) – as quoted in Fast Company, the average annual return on the Workplace Fund over the past 5 years (a recessionary period) was 10.81%. The S&P Index for the same period was just 3.97%, a 6.84% difference.
And here is some bonus ammunition: younger employees crave social impact opportunities. According to The 2011 Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT survey of employed adults ages 21 – 35, millennials who frequently participate in workplace volunteer activities are nearly twice as likely to be very satisfied with the progression of their career.
