Employee engagement is considered one of the most powerful measures of a company’s vigor towards competitive advantage and high performance. Employee engagement involves creating prospects for employees to attach with their managers, colleagues and organizations.
How to boost your Employee Engagement?
Think: health insurance plans, career development plans, diversity, voice for workers, creative space, ‘two-way’ meetings, appreciation, talent development, safe workplace (safe in terms of good work desk, tables, tools, sexual harassment prevention, etc), nursing rooms, healthy lunch (and all other enabling work conditions that motivate, and engage your employees). Get the most out of your Human Capital!
High turnover of staff = a cost
Loosing talent = a cost
Under utilizing talent = missed opportunity
Enhanced levels of employee engagement are certainly needed. According to Gallup’s 2013 State of the Global Workplace study, only 13% of employees across 142 countries are engaged at work. Another 63% are disengaged-essentially “checked out.” And almost a quarter of all employees –24% are “actively disengaged.” Taken together, these disengaged and “actively disengaged” workers outnumber the engaged workers by a ratio of almost 7:1.
Although employee engagement varies widely by region and by economic and cultural conditions, these globally low levels of employee engagement negatively impact not only performance, productivity, and bottom-line results, but also retention –particularly for a company’s top performers who have the most employment options. On a macro level, these losses hinder economic productivity and quality of life for economies and countries globally.
Kenya ranked employee engagement and retention as their number one objective according to a study done by Deloitte East Africa. This was besides other key elements in human resources such as corporate learning, talent analytics, performance management, talent acquisition and leadership development. Engaging people has become even more of a business imperative in uncertain times. Organizations in Kenya are under unprecedented pressure to deliver greater value to their customers and shareholders. This value – in all its forms – is created by harnessing the discretionary efforts of employees.
A research done by AoN Kenya shows that engaged employees are consistently positive on matters concerning their organization to colleagues, potential employees and customers. They also work for the organisation for a long time and put in extra effort, even beyond their job descriptions to succeed. The top five trends in Kenya are Retention and Engagement, Reskilling the HR Function, Leadership, Talent acquisition and access and Workforce Capability.
