Employee engagement is a topic thrown around frequently, organisations in Australia have been trying to prioritise engaging their staff for years, 84% of employees surveyed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics agreed that they could be more productive at work. Dale Carnegie research has shown that for many businesses, engagement levels have started stagnating, with employees feeling like they have not advanced or progressed in the way they hoped for the investment they have made.
New research, ‘Employee Engagement, It’s Time To Go All-In’, carried out by Dale Carnegie discovered that although 85% of leaders say employee engagement is a priority only a third of organisations actually make it one. In-fact 35% of leaders said that focusing on employee engagement was a distraction from getting the real work done.
For businesses, the case for engaging employees remains as strong as ever, the data clearly showing that engaged employees are the new competitive advantage. Any company that had a highly engaged workforce has been shown to outperform their competition. Employee disengagement costs Australia approximat
ely $70 billion annually, with labour costs rising 70% over the last 20 years. Having engaged employees decreases the need for turnover, which costs the country $3.8 billion annually within the first year of employment. 64% of managers are able to lower employee turnover by making engagement a daily priority.
Having conversations around employee engagement should not be something to fear, an engaged workforce are statistically 4 times more likely to complete a task if their manager made employee engagement a daily habit.
With a lot of companies wanting to strengthen their employee engagement and take it to the next level, Dale Carnegie’s research suggests that if leaders make engagement a daily habit, they can achieve the results they desire.
Dale Carnegie’s 4 Steps to Making Employee Engagement a Daily Habit
1. Treat employee engagement like all other strategic priorities.
2. Engage employees and managers at every level. Creating a culture of engagement involves everyone. Only 33% of senior leaders said their company engaged them.
3. Provide practical knowledge and skills – 20% of respondents said they did not feel they had the training in how to engage their team.
4. Align reward and recognition – leaders who strongly agreed that they expect to be rewarded and recognised for having fully-recognition in Australian workplaces are shown to decrease employee turnover by 23-31%.
Explore our resources and solutions to boost employee engagement among your teams here.