Did you know that on average for every 2 “engaged” employees, 1 is “disengaged”? Take a look around your office, for every 2 people you see totally into their work and helping the company there is one that is doing the opposite and hurting the business.
According to Gallup’s research, 50% of employees are “not engaged” and 18% are “actively DIS-engaged”. That means that over 2/3 of employees in an average company are potentially having a negative impact on other employees, clients, and the company as a whole. Based on their research this lack of engagement cost $300 billion in lost productivity each year. That’s a lot of money!
On the flip side, the best in class organizations ratios are 67% of employees are engaged, 26% not engaged, and only 7% actively disengaged. Another interesting point in their research is that companies with best in class employee engagement had earnings growth of up to 390% higher than average companies. Again, that’s a lot of money!
So how do we determine if our employees are engaged or not? And once we determine that, what do we do about it? These were the questions that were floating around my head late last year. So once again, I turned to the Doug Williams Group to help us perform an Employee Engagement survey. We sent out an online survey to all of our employees and asked 13 simple questions (see a sample of a few questions listed below).
- I am willing to put in extra effort beyond what is expected
- I am motivated to contribute to the success of Compuquip
- I would not be willing to work for one of our competitors
- I have a passion for my work
Also, at the end of each survey the employees had an opportunity to share some specific thoughts, all anonymously. One of the initial concerns was if the surveys were truly anonymous but based on the comments we received I can assure you most people felt it was anonymous.
Although my initial reaction was to get people’s names that filled out the surveys and match it up to their comments, DWG would not allow it. We had some negative comments & complaints and that drove me to want to find out who wrote them. To be honest, not because I wanted to get mad at them or fire them, more because I really wanted to figure out how to fix it.
As a manager, one of the frustrating things about the survey was some of the comments / complaints were actually things that we have already addressed and we are either not communicating properly or we misunderstood the feedback we had previously received. That drove me more to get the names of the responses but DWG again refused.
Our average score of Employee Engagement was 4.63 out of 5.0, which is very encouraging. That’s a phenomenal score and I’m very happy, however I can’t help but wonder, how can we make it 100%? And how can we address the complaints and comments to make the team even happier and more engaged.
More on that next time…
