Employee engagement matters.
We’ve written about it in the past, and shown that improving employee engagement generates some big benefits. Engaged employees:
However, that’s just the start of the conversation on this critical topic.
In this article, we’ll explore the other side of this topic — what problems crop up when you ignore your employee engagement levels, and how you can quickly and easily keep an eye on your engagement levels at all times.
To do so, we will explore:
- A brief recap of what “employee engagement” really is
- The 5 problems that occur when you ignore employee engagement
- How platforms like Grytics can monitor engagement 24/7/365
What Is Employee Engagement and Why Care About It?
Gallup has been studying employee engagement for 50 years, and defines it as “...the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.”
Unfortunately, Gallup also notes that “…only 15% of employees worldwide and 35% in the U.S. fall in the ‘engaged’ category.”
Which means most of your employees might be disengaged without you realizing it — and that can create some big problems over the long term.
5 Problems Created by Low Employee Engagement
To be clear, poor employee engagement doesn’t create problems overnight, and the problems it creates are not always obvious. Your employees won’t suddenly become disengaged from their work and just quit out of nowhere.
Instead, poor employee engagement is a chronic issue that grows over time, slowly erodes morale, and gradually creates a host of subtle problems that you may not even realize are building up in your company — and which you may not even realize are being caused by declining engagement.
Yet these problems are real, they are documented, and they have been directly correlated with declining engagement.
The 5 biggest problems correlated with low employee engagement are…
Problem 1: Decreased Productivity and Performance
Strong employee engagement correlates with at least 17 – 21% greater productivity and 20% higher sales. By contrast disengaged workers make 60% more errors, they cost their employer 34% of their salary in lost productivity, and they cost the U.S. economy $450 - $550 billion per year. The point is clear — the more disengaged employees you have, the more you lose.
Problem 2: Decreased Safety and Wellbeing, and Increased Burnout
Highly engaged employees experience 70% fewer safety incidents, take better care of their health, and suffer less burnout. The opposite is also true. The more disengaged your employees become — and the less you monitor and manage their wellbeing — the greater chance they will become sick, injured, and incapable of delivering their best work (or any work at all).
Problem 3: Decreased Attendance and Retention
If you fail to maintain engagement levels, your staff will show up less and quit more. As mentioned above, highly engaged employees work with 41% lower absenteeism. At the same time, actively engaged workforces experience less turnover — in high-turnover organizations, employee engagement reduces turnover by 18%. In low-turnover organizations, turnover decreases by 43% — while 74% of disengaged employees are looking for new jobs.
Problem 4: Ignoring (and Losing) Top Performers
Another study arrived at similar results — 73% of employees are open to leaving their job, even if they aren’t actively seeking new work. One of the main reasons? A lack of recognition. By contrast, companies that recognize high achievers experience 31% lower turnover, and 37% of employees say that being personally recognized for their good work is their top motivation. By ignoring engagement, you lose the chance to recognize the employees who are already doing the most, and the chance to push the rest to strive higher.
Problem 5: Decreased Company Profits and Growth
Finally, companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable than others. The phenomena is known as the Engagement Profit Chain, where higher employee engagement leads to higher service, customer satisfaction, sales, profits, and shareholder returns. Simply put — if you ignore employee engagement, you lose one of your biggest levers for driving your company’s growth.
In sum: If you ignore employee engagement, you’ll suffer a wide range of big problems throughout your entire organization. Thankfully, there’s a simple and easy way to monitor employee engagement at all times — with Grytics.
How to Manage Employee Engagement 24/7/365 with Grytics
Grytics is a platform that analyzes employee engagement data from Workplace from Meta, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams. Then, Grytics reports on it, and gives you a clear picture of what’s happening on your collaboration networks. To do so, Grytics offers a few core features:
- Content Metrics: See which of your posted content has received the most engagement and what needs a boost.
- Member Metrics: Identify which of your employees are most engaged, and can help make everyone else more engaged.
- Sentiment Analysis: Measure how your employees are feeling about their work and your company.
To learn more, check out our previous in-depth article on the topic of improving employee engagement. Or, schedule a 1-on-1 demo today.