Blog

Employee engagement: the buzzword is everywhere, but can anyone really agree on what it means? How do you measure it? And how can you build an effective strategy that works in your unique company culture?

Employee engagement is tricky to define because it represents different things to different people. Some companies describe engagement as an emotional commitment to the company that includes both loyalty and dedication to achieving goals. Others define engagement in terms of productivity.

The truth is that both viewpoints are right. Engagement expert and Chief Scientific officer at Engage2Excel Jack Wiley, Ph.D. defines it this way: “Employee engagement is the extent to which employees are motivated to contribute to organizational success and are willing to apply discretionary effort to accomplishing tasks important to the achievement of organizational goals.”

Due to ever-increasing competition for top talent, employee retention has become a critical business concern across all major industries. As the economy continues to perform well and the unemployment rate continues to decline, business leaders, HR executives and managers need to understand the current drivers of employee turnover in order to improve the effectiveness of their retention initiatives.

Our latest Trendicators survey report, Why Do Employees Leave?, provides new, science-driven insights about why employees are seriously considering leaving their current employer in the next 12 months.

More than half (53 percent) of U.S. companies with 500 or more employees conduct employee engagement surveys. However, more than a third of managers do not act on the results of these surveys. The implications of this inaction, which has held at a relatively constant rate for several years, are particularly significant in today’s business environment in which high turnover rates and historically low unemployment converge to reduce capacity for achieving growth forecasts.

All employers, large and small, are competing to attract and retain employees for the same hard-to-fill jobs in today’s highly competitive, candidate-driven marketplace.

McKinsey & Company reports that more than three- quarters of Fortune 500 CEOs do not believe their companies are effective at attracting highly talented people. Of those CEOs who do consider their companies successful at attracting top talent, only 7% believe they are effective in retaining them.