We’ve posted a lot on Employee Engagement on this blog. That’s because it’s a very pertinent topic to each and every business – large or small, profit or non-profit, established or a new start-up. Keeping a pulse of your employees not only means keeping them when times are hard, but also can pay big dividends to your bottom line because your productivity benefits.
It becomes difficult, however, when assessing which areas to focus on when attempting to increase employee engagement. Engagement is a complex mechanism to measure, entailing dozens of individual components. And tackling every issue can quickly turn into an insurmountable task.
Given this, it is essential to identify those areas that will have the greatest impact on engagement. And this does not necessarily equate to focusing on those areas that are performing the lowest.
For instance, most employees, regardless of company and industry, indicate that they believe their pay and benefits packages are not as competitive as they want them to be – in turn, most have negative perceptions about their compensation. It’s not uncommon to see 50% of your employee base give low marks on these related items within the survey. But does this mean that employees are disengaged with the company because of this?
We have found, however, that pay and benefits are not strong drivers of engagement despite the fact that they are often the lowest performing area of the collective measure of engagement. With this in mind, you may be wasting valuable resources trying to fix only this issue in your attempts to increase your employees’ engagement with the company.
And the right items to focus on aren’t always easy to identify. Here at IQS Research, we use a series of advanced data analytic techniques that identify those items that will have the greatest impact on your employees’ engagement with the company. Using this method allows employers to sift through the stubble and pinpoint those areas that need to be addressed immediately in order to avoid high turnover and damage to your bottom line. Drivers of engagement are not based upon performance, but rather their relationship to the employee experience.
Of course, we would not be very good and responsible researchers if we told you to ignore those areas within employee opinion that are performing very poorly. They certainly need to be addressed. Rather, prioritizing the issues is what is key here, and what the advanced analytics allows us to do. Just like goal setting, prioritization is of utmost importance when trying to tackle real and perplexing issues.
