Survey Says: Engagement and Delivery are What MattersNovember 16th, 2007 |
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If you haven’t seen the recent surveys from Watson Wyatt and Towers Perrin, they are both well worth a read. Both surveys highlight the challenges faced by HR and provide some compelling evidence on the importance of employee engagement. Some hard numbers help to reinforce what HR already anecdotally knows - recruiting and keeping talent is a lot easier when the organization invests in their employees.
Watson Wyatt’s 2007/2008 Global Strategic Rewards Report looks at how companies worldwide are handling attraction, employee retention and reward management issues. Key findings on a global basis include:
- The majority of employers have problems attracting critical-skill employees (70 percent) and top-performing employees (67 percent)
- Financially high-performing firms get performance management right. For example, their managers are much more likely to link organizational performance to rewards (51 percent versus 38 percent of low-performing organizations)
- Clearly setting expectations and delivering on the reward promise is a formula for a more engaged workforce. 69 percent of employees who say their employers succeed at both promise and delivery are highly engaged, compared with roughly 25 percent overall.
The Towers Perrin Global Workforce Study takes a hard look at employee engagement. The global study includes a survey of nearly 90,000 workers in 18 countries and information from a normative database with more than two million employee records total. The main finding from this study is that employees do not believe their organizations or senior management are doing enough to help them become fully engaged and contribute to their company’s success. This “engagement gap” as coined in the study is reinforced by the numbers in the survey:
- Just 21 percent of the employees surveyed around the world are engaged in their work, meaning they’re willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed.
- 38 percent are partly to fully disengaged.
While I can’t say I am entirely surprised by these findings, it serves to point out that more organizations need to wake up and take the steps required to get employee performance and talent management to the next level. And by that I mean, doing more than getting rid of paper forms, but by finding ways to truly deliver on organizational goal alignment, pay for performance and other initiatives. For those of you already moving in this direction, congratulations, you are ahead of the curve. For those of you that haven’t, make it a focus for 2008 and if need be, take these findings to your boardroom to build the case for making talent management a strategic priority.
Tags: HR, pay for performance, performance management, talent managementRelated posts
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