Linkage Research: Employee Engagement
By: Benjamin Schneider, Ph.D., Senior Practice Fellow, bschneider@valtera.com, and Karen M. Barbera, Ph.D., Senior Vice-President and Managing Principal, kbarbera@valtera.com
Continuing last month's series on linkage research, today's blog focuses on employee engagement as the underpinning of service climate. In fact, our thinking about the foundation on which companies might build a service climate is what led us to our more recent work on employee engagement. We asked ourselves the question: What is it that employees experience that permits organizations to build a service climate? We realized that this question had much broader implications: What is it that employees experience that permits organizations to build any kind of strategic climate—a climate for service, for sure, but also a climate for innovation, a climate for safety, and so forth.
We realized that employee engagement is the foundation on which companies can build important strategic initiatives of all kinds, and that this was a key to understanding the role of human resources in organizational performance and effectiveness. We began our work on employee engagement prior to its being an industry buzz word. Two important items were produced from our early work:
- An extensive and intensive review of the academic research literature on employee engagement so that we could locate the phenomenon and understand how it relates to ostensibly similar ideas (like job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job involvement). We concluded that engagement is different especially in that it has to do with energy and enthusiasm as well as urgency, adaptability, and persistence, rather than concepts like satisfaction or commitment.
- A new and unique measurement of employee engagement focusing on feelings of engagement and the engagement behavior that characterizes work groups of all sizes (teams, entire companies). Having learned from the service climate work that it was important to focus on work units (not individuals) as we proceeded, we again focused on employees in the aggregate and not individual employees one at a time.
We now have two sets of dramatic results from our research using the new engagement measures within a market panel approach. In today's blog, we discuss the first set of results. This comes from a major study, again of customer satisfaction, but this time across companies where we predict the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores for 32 companies.
Shown in the figure above are the ACSI results for the companies that scored in the top and bottom 25 percent in terms of employee engagement. As can be seen, organizations with more engaged workforces scored 6 points higher on the ACSI than those with less engaged workforces. More importantly, this difference translates to significantly better ROI, future cash flows, and other important financial incomes.
Next up: More research results and financial implications
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