Poor employee engagement costs companies billions. According to the Gallup Organization’s State of the American Workplace Report, U.S. companies lose between $450 billion and $550 billion due to employee disengagement.
To respond to this critical need, employers are attempting to initiate and measure employee engagement programs. However, according to Part III of theEMPLOYEEapp’s 2015 Mobile Trends in the Workplace survey, which polled corporate and internal communications professionals at more than 300 companies, the question still remains whether these programs, and the way in which companies are communicating with their workforce, are effective.
According to the survey, 71 percent of employers have employee engagement initiatives in place. However, of those, only one-third (37 percent) believe their employees are engaged. Respondents indicated that half of their employees are “somewhat” engaged and 12 percent believe engagement is a significant problem.
“Employee engagement continues to be a major challenge for companies and it is the number one challenge we hear from the many internal communications and human resource professionals that we speak to daily,” said Jeff Corbin, founder and CEO of theEMPLOYEEapp.
“As the workforce population continues to skew younger, employers are now being forced to think outside of the box and re-imagine how employee engagement can be accomplished. Based on the results of our survey, there is a lot of room for improvement.”
How are employers combating poor employee engagement?
To address the problem of poor employee engagement, approximately half of the companies surveyed said they conduct baseline surveys and are using the results to build and modify programs. When it comes to building and implementing engagement programs, the following tactics and strategies were utilized most by the responding companies:
See: Top 10 HR Secrets to Measure Employee Engagement Levels
Employer/employee communications strategies have not changed.
As was identified in the first two parts of the EMPLOYEEapp’s survey, the ability for employees to easily access information and to be more productive in their work directly correlates to enhanced employee engagement. In addition, the frequency and method of communications are of significant importance.
Employers agreed that the way in which a company communicates with employees directly impacts engagement (91 percent). However, given the changing demographics of employees and, in particular, Millennials, they don’t feel their companies utilize enough digital communications tools to communicate.
Rather, old school communications methods like email (98 percent) and face-to-face communications (90 percent) are the norm. Corporate intranets were cited as a distant third method of employee communications.
Interestingly, notwithstanding the proliferation of mobile technology over the past several years, only 16 percent indicated that mobile applications are used by their companies to communicate with employees.
Corbin concluded, “Not only do employers acknowledge the problems that their companies face with respect to engagement, but they also recognize the importance of communications to improving it. The failure of their companies to stay ahead of the technological curve and to appeal to the needs of their employees will only become more evident as lower productivity, due to lack of engagement.”
Also read: What will be the future of Employee Engagement?
Image credit: motivation.cloudapps.com
