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Moving Beyond Engagement to Enablement

Back to blog homepage for: Strategic Employee Recognition: by Derek Irvine

Why should you care about employee engagement and enablement? Hay Group recently released these numbers:

• 59% of UK employees started 2010 planning to find a new job
• Organisations that engage and enable employees reduce voluntary turnover by 54%
• Employees who are both highly engaged and enabled are 50% more likely to outperform expectations

That’s great… But what’s enablement? Hay group defines an enabling work environment as one that “empowers employees to ‘go the extra mile’ and provides the tools and processes to actively deal with employee frustrations.”

Sounds a lot like what I talked about in my last post on removing obstacles so employees can make progress – which they define as their own greatest factor of engagement.

What’s that look like in real numbers?

"Revenue: A typical company with $5 billion in revenues in an industry with average revenue growth of eight percent would see revenues increase by $400 million. A company with top quartile levels of employee engagement could expect an increase of $1 billion. And a company in the top quartile on both engagement and enablement could anticipate an increase of a full $1.8 billion.

"Turnover: For an organisation with 20,000 employees and an annual voluntary turnover rate of eight percent, the cost of turnover is approximately $56 million (assuming an average salary of $35,000). Reducing the voluntary turnover rate by 40 percent would yield annual savings of $22.4 million. But reductions in turnover through high levels of engagement and enablement would yield savings of over $30 million annually, a difference of more than $7.5 million.

"Employee performance: For an organisation producing $10 billion of product with 20 percent of employees exceeding performance expectations, increasing the percentage of high performers by 1.5 times (by transforming average performers into superior performers) would increase output by $350 million (ie, if 10 percent of population improves performance by 35 percent, overall performance improvement across entire population is 3.5 percent)."

I’ve often argued that you cannot engage employees; you can only create a work environment in which employees want to engage. Enabling employees – listening to them, removing obstacles, resolving frustrations – is one way you can create that environment. And it will pay off.

 

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Editor's Welcome

 

Hello! And welcome back as we enter 2012, with a busy year ahead of us all. With talk of double-dip recessions, a possible partial or even full break-up of the Eurozone and unemployment rates set to hit nearly 9%, topics such as organisational streamlining, staff resilience and talent management are likely to be on many an HR professional's lips over the next 12 months.
 
But to lighten the gloom here in the UK, we also have the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and its attendant public holidays to look forward to at the start of June. Followed by two weeks of Olympic Games from 27 July to 12 August and the Paralympics from 29 August to 9 September, each generating their own excitement, but also issues to work through for hard-pressed HR departments trying to sort out the multifarious staffing issues in advance.
 
So with an interesting but challenging year to come, HRZone promises to be with you, supporting you all the way and providing our usual insightful blend of news, analysis, community blogs and expert comment to help you sort the wheat from the chaff. As ever, we love to hear from you too so feel free to either post your words of wisdom to our blog section yourself or, in the case of longer, more in-depth ‘expert voice’ articles, drop me a line with any ideas to cath.everett@siftmedia.co.uk.....
 
Cath Everett
HRZone Editor 
 
 
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