There’s bad news for organizations working hard to improve employee engagement: overall, it’s still declining. With so much time and energy being focused on this issue, what is still going wrong? In order to get some answers, Quantum Workplace — a company with an employee feedback platform designed to make work better each day — conducted a more in depth survey to see the macro and micro trends occurring with employee engagement.
The study reveals that the employee engagement is relatively flat, manager effectiveness is in trouble and the key employee demographics are less engaged.
Their Infographic below delves into how different types of employees’ engagement are driven by differing unique factors. So maybe it’s time to stop approaching engagement with one-size-fits-all strategies.
Some highlights include:
Men consistently have reported slightly higher (3 percent or less) levels of engagement than women over the last three years. And while both males and females increased in levels of engagement in 2015, men increased nearly 11 times more, creating an even larger divide between the two genders.
Employees who selected “another identity” when asked about their gender are mostly disengaged, compared to males and females. Only 40.9 percent of this group was engaged. More than 12 percent of employees who selected “another identity” were considered hostile and 17 percent were disengaged.
When analyzing year-over-year trends, women’s engagement drivers have remained fairly consistent, as none of their top six drivers fluctuated in rank or importance from last year. However, one notable item in women’s top 10 is on the rise.
The item, “The organization makes investments to make me more successful,” jumped four spots for women this year, making it the seventh highest driver of employee engagement among women. What’s taking a back seat to investments in women’s future success? Trust in senior leaders.
For the third year in a row, baby boomers have been the most engaged age group. Employees 66 years old and older were the most engaged at 77.3 percent, followed by the younger baby boomers, employees ages 56 to 65, with 71.8 percent engaged.
Nearly 10 percentage points behind baby boomers, employees between 26 and 35 years old were the least engaged at 67.3 percent. Worse yet, the older millennial group had 1.7 times more hostile and disengaged employees than the most engaged age group.
Young employees entering the workforce were engaged, but as employees got older, engagement dipped before rising back up. When examining year-over-year changes in engagement by race and ethnicity, only one group experienced a decline. Engagement among Asian employees decreased 2.2 percent, while all other groups increased.
New employees were the most engaged among all tenure groups. Almost 78 percent of employees tenured less than one year were engaged, measuring 10 percentage points higher engagement than the next most engaged tenure groups. Middle-tenured employees, ranging three to nine years in tenure, were the least engaged at 63 percent.
When examining engagement level by department, sales and human resources were the most engaged. Roughly 80 percent of employees in both departments were engaged, compared to three-fourths or less of every other department. Healthcare departments, including medical, nursing, and clinical staff, had the least engaged employees with less than 60 percent.
