In recent years, HR managers and recruiting professionals have been putting more focus on improving the employee engagement, one of the most critical talent management topics that have a significant impact on the success of a business. Employees who are highly engaged with their employers can help to maximise a company’s investment in its people, improve productivity as well as reduce costs.

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What does employee engagement mean?

Employee engagement stands for the commitment that an employee has to their company and their devotion to the overall company’s success.

There are different types of employee engagement in a typical organisation: those who are engaged; those who are not engaged; and those who are actively disengaged.

Engaged staff immerses their entire self into their job - physical, emotional and cognitive; they are satisfied and energised by their jobs. The higher the level of engagement, the more your employees are willing to work hard, putting in more effort to contribute to the success and reputation of their organisation.

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That explains why engaged employees are vital to the prosperity and the sustainability of an organisation while at the same time keeping their competitive advantage intact. On the other hand, unsatisfied and not engaged employees tend to spread their unhappiness and negativity throughout the organisation.

Why employee engagement matters?

Employees are the ones who keep the operation runs smoothly, help to achieve the long-term success and contribute to delivering the organisation’s values. How well an organisation engages its employees will decide how well it performs in terms of productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction, and employee absenteeism and turnover.

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Organisations that succeeded in engaging the employees will also gain a competitive attribute for their business brand. The level of engagement of your employees will affect the entire performance outcomes. The top three reasons why employee engagement is highly crucial to your talent management are:

Lower Absenteeism and Turnover Rates

Engaged employees are focused and devoted to their responsibility. Once someone has a passion for something, they would want to perform their best to accomplish the given tasks. When an employee is absent from work, chances are, it will hinder the project productivity, delay the response to customer’s inquiries. When an employee is engaged, they felt motivated to fulfil their tasks and become an excellent individual of their team, therefore, they tend to have a lower rate of absenteeism.

Furthermore, engaged and satisfied employees will less likely to leave their current jobs and switch to another job. Managers who want to retain their talent pool should pay attention to establishing an encouraging working environment and investing in employees’ satisfaction and wellbeing to keep their employees engaged.

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Higher Productivity

A team of highly engaged employees will outperform a group of disengaged employees, studies found. It can be seen that if the organisations succeeded in cultivating an environment of employee engagement, their staff are more productive, the customers are happier, which eventually leads to higher profit for the business.

How your employees feel about their employer is deeply connected to how they perform their job. A study of over 23,000 businesses found that those with the most engaged employees were 18% more productive than those with the least. And the 18% is enough to have an impact on the organisation’s productivity and future success.

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Connected Employees

Engaged employees mean your workers feel attached to their workplace, and also, their peers. A connected working culture encourages communication and leads to an increase in productivity for the whole team.

The young Millennial workforce nowadays tends to research their potential employer’s corporate culture first before deciding whether to work for them or not. This leads to a priority for an employer to invest in cultivating their employee engagement, consolidating the involvement and treating the employees as an important part of a larger picture in their organisation.

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A working culture succeeds in connecting and engaging their employees will also succeed in building up their employer brand and recruitment process. Once the working environment can stimulate positive employee engagement, it will result in the ‘discretionary effort’ of the employees. It means that people are willing to go the extra mile to conduct their tasks wholeheartedly. Beside lowering absenteeism and turnover, improving productivity and putting together a connected workforce, engaged employees will invest themselves in their company’s success and conduct their tasks in a more impactful way.