Engagement – what is it and why is it important
If it is 5-7 times more expensive to win a new customer as it is to keep a current customer, the impact of having even one disengaged employee can be huge.
We need to rethink how we consider employee engagement. We can all read the research on the relationship between employee engagement and productivity, but in today’s world, we need to look at it from another perspective: the power of social media and the consumer.
Some of you may recall the experience of Canadian musician David Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell whose $3,500 Taylor guitar was broken during a trip on United Airlines. His 2009 song chronicling the poor response from United became a YouTube phenomenon.
At the end of the first day the number of views totalled 150,000; three days later it had amassed to 500,000; two years later it has had over 10 million hits! (https://tinyurl.com/ybun5pts). Six years on, it has grown to 17m views.
Sadly, I’m not sure United Airlines learned from this incident and I am sure you are familiar with the 2017 incident of United Airlines staff physically dragging a passenger from an overbooked flight. How different would David Carroll’s experience have been if he had encountered a highly engaged employee who cared about his experience?
An interesting definition of engagement was put forward in the Towers Watson Global Workforce Study from 2012, and while a little old, I believe it is useful for our future exploration of engagement and the millennial. They undertook a study of over 32,000 employees across 30 countries and recognised a difference between traditional engagement and sustainable engagement which they defined as follows:
Tradition engagement is the willingness to invest discretionary effort on the job
Sustainable engagement is a work environment that more fully energises employees by promoting their physical, emotional and social well-being.
Sustainable engagement is more closely aligned to the needs of millennials that view life more holistically than previous generations.
Over the last decade, the majority of organisations have been working on improving their employee engagement. Every year they run their surveys, map out their scores and develop strategies to improve them. These strategies often entail some degree of organisational change, sometimes minor sometimes ‘transformational’. This in itself is challenging given that we know from research states over 50% of change initiatives fail.
The problem is, that if we can’t engage our current workforce, how are we going to get on when75% of our workforce is made up on millennials, which is predicted to be the case within the next decade.