The July issue of Talent Management magazine recently ran a story on employee engagement evaluation that shared some interesting and compelling stats on why organizations need employee engagement surveys.

The article by Deanna Hartley provides a look at the evolution of the job satisfaction survey and how doing these surveys benefits organizations. As she points out:

As the aftermath of economic woes continues to reverberate across industries worldwide, a key component of enhancing productivity and ensuring optimal performance in the marketplace is to create and sustain an engaged workforce.

Some 93 percent of high-performing companies utilize employee engagement surveys compared with 78 percent of lower performers, according to a February “HR Metrics Pulse Survey” conducted by i4cp, a network of corporations focused on improving workforce productivity. The ability to obtain business value as a result of employee engagement surveys, however, rests with each individual company.

Hartley’s article spends a lot of time discussing how to be strategic about it; the questions on the survey are critical. According to the article, some key questions that should be included in the survey are:

• Do you know what’s expected of you at work?
• Do you have the appropriate materials and equipment to adequately perform your job?
• Does your job align with your talents?

Once the survey is done, the key is to “link the survey to actionable results.” As the article points out, the survey should not be an event, but a program to bring about change as companies with engaged workforces have superior return on assets, profitability and nearly double the shareholder value. In fact, recent research that looked at engagement in work units, and the resulting profitability and turnover rates found:

• There was a 62 percent difference in safety incidents, an 18 percent difference in productivity and a 12 percent difference in profit between business units who ranked in the top quartile for engagement versus those in the bottom quartile.
• There was a 31 percent turnover difference between top- and bottom-quartile ranking work units in high-turnover organizations, and a 51 percent difference in low-turnover organizations.
• At the company level, top-quartile ranking organizations registered 2.6 times greater growth in earnings per share compared to competitors.

If you’re already conducting employee satisfaction and engagement surveys today, maybe it’s time to look a little harder and see how you can improve on what you are already doing. And if you aren’t doing a survey at all, it’s probably time to start, so that you can plan where to go from there, given the proven business impact employee satisfaction can have on an organization.