The correlation between business with a highly engaged workforce and those with superior financial performance is well document and the case reasonably solid but is it the foundation of a successful business or a dangerous distraction?
Employee engagement is both a lag and a lead indicator. If engagement scores are low, it’s a lead indicator that future business performance will be poor but as a lag indicator, the business probably has a whole bunch of performance challenges already. So, what’s the answer? Well there are other indicators that fall into two groups: those that measure the symptoms of poor engagement; high employee turnover, high absenteeism, low productivity etc, and there are those may shine light on the causes but are harder to measure and provide the foundations for success: employees understanding of the strategy and how they contribute to it, appropriate skills in the workforce, the right IT tools etc. Whilst the first group are also lag indicators, they are easy to measure and should give useful early insights into how engaged the workforce is. Initiatives to improve these important challenges will be the ones that are likely to target the causes of the poor engagement and may well involve the foundations in the second list. So, engagement is important and should be kept in the mind, but it is an outcome that is both an indicator of future performance and a lag indicator of business challenges. Business leaders should focus on the lag indicators that are the symptoms of poor engagement, address those through initiative that ensure the real foundations are in place and employee engagement will be on the up.
1 Comment
|
What?Our thoughts about helping your people Archives
October 2022
Categories |