HR Professional - April/May 2008 - (Page 11)

LEADERSHIP M AT T E R S WINNING STRATEGIES ate in 2007, professional services firm Towers Perrin released its groundbreaking Global Workforce Study, the largest single survey of employees in midsize and large companies polling almost 90,000 employees in 18 countries across four continents. The majority of respondents were well educated and highly skilled, with an average of nine years at their current companies. More than half worked upwards of 40 hours per week. What is so illuminating about the Tower Perrins study is its findings around employee engagement. It turns out only 14 per cent of respondents are highly engaged, one-quarter are genuinely disengaged and a whopping 62 per cent of employees are only moderately engaged. Keep in mind that the majority of respondents are exactly the workers your company can’t afford to lose. The study authors refer to the mood of this moderately engaged group as “willing but wary.” Willing employees are your B- and Clevel players who get the job done as required but don’t go above and beyond that. On the other hand, “engaged employees redefine the job to improve efficiency, effectiveness and results.” These are your high-achieving, boundary-testing A-players. What’s more, Towers Perrin did a regression analysis of the financials of 40 global companies and discovered that those with the highest percentage of engaged employees increased their operating income by 19 per cent and their earnings per share by 28 per cent. Those with the lowest showed year-to-year declines of 33 per cent in operating income and 11 per cent in earnings per share. This confirms that engagement has a profound effect on the bottom line. But if 62 per cent are only maintaining the status quo, your company is most certainly missing out on profits and growth. BY DEBBIE BENNETT L Driving better performance So how do you keep employees interested and motivated, and increase ROI? Popular thinking in the last decade points to personal values and daily work environment as the most w w w. HRT houghtLeader. c om inﬂuential factors, but it turns out that the extent to which employees believe senior management is sincerely interested in employee wellbeing is the real Holy Grail of engagement. Employees will leave when they have doubts about whether senior leaders have their best interests at heart. The study also indicates that employees quickly become despondent when they believe that pay programs are not designed or implemented fairly. While it sounds simple enough, Towers Perrin can’t identify one way to make this happen but instead comes to four conclusions about how to drive better employee performance and increase engagement: • Senior leaders must be visibly involved and employees need to understand the organization’s mission, vision and strategy. • There must be a dedicated emphasis on learning, skill enhancement and career development. • Front line managers and supervisors must be effective, trained and behave in a way that’s consistent with cultural values. • The company must have a solid reputation as an employer and be seen as talentfriendly and progressive in its peoplepractices. A moderately engaged—or “willing but wary”—workforce is one of the biggest business challenges facing Canadian organizations. “Moderately engaged” means an employee could be one bad manager away from becoming fully disengaged in their work, or one in-house training program away from becoming highly engaged and actively seeking better ways of doing things. And a highly engaged workforce is the key to your company’s success. Debbie Bennett is chair of HRPA of Ontario’s board of directors. A p r i l / M a y 2 0 0 8 11 http://www.HRThoughtLeader.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of HR Professional - April/May 2008

HR Professional - April/May 2008 Contents Editor's Letter Contributors Leadership Matters By the Numbers On the Web Careers World Watch Accounting Health & Safety Foreign Professionals Management Office Life Legal Compensation Web 2.0 @ Work Talent Management Systems On Message Strategy HR 101 Interview With Colin Mackay Off the Shelf The Last Word

HR Professional - April/May 2008

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