The benefits of an engaged workforce
The most important benefit of an engaged workforce, the one everyone cares about most – is the fact that engagement correlates with profitability.
Companies with engaged employees typically enjoy revenue growth that is 2.5 times higher than companies with unengaged ones (Source).
It’s simple: When your employees are engaged, they care about your company and are more willing to contribute wholeheartedly to its growth.
You cannot build an empire on employees who are “quiet quitting” – a new term recently added to the Collins dictionary that can be defined as only doing what is expected of you by your job description, and nothing more.
Despite the lack of obligation to go above and beyond, it is often this passion that fuels companies, and without it, they can miss important opportunities. It can also swing into much more negative territory such as malicious compliance: strictly following the orders of superiors, knowing they may have unintended or negative results.
Engagement increases productivity, creates more genuine interactions within the company and increases employee retention. As a result, the company has more time for actual productivity instead of distractions and chaos trying to subsidise staff every week, for example. These are just a few of the main benefits, but let’s dive deeper into these and more below.
Increased productivity
£438 billion is lost every year due to workplace stress. (Source)
And not only that, but burnout runs rampant through unchecked workforces affecting about 70% of employees at least once in their professional careers, according to a survey conducted with 1,000 full-time professionals.
This is the cost of unengaged and overworked employees, but when investing in your employee engagement you can avoid all of that.
While engagement doesn’t negate all stress from overworking (and this is where the other factors come in handy), engaged workers are generally much faster and more efficient in completing their work.
Engaged workers are also far more likely to actually contribute ideas for the betterment of the company instead of being too stressed, tired or stifled to express them.
Research shows that engaged employees are 17% more productive than their peers. (Source)
Positive company interactions
It’s important to maintain transparency and communication among the workforce. Not only because it reduces misunderstandings, complications and stress in any workforce’s productivity pipeline, but it also creates stronger bonds and that sense of inclusion where no one feels left behind or out of the loop.
It also lends to our first engagement strategy (which we talk about more below), where positive company interactions can increase autonomy, and therefore innovation. If your employees have access to all departments and members of the company at their fingertips, as well as adequate knowledge of what’s going on in their company as a whole, they could have more space for new, innovative and collaborative ideas.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, this is possible. Numerous tools and applications exist in the form of social media and work-specific collaboration tools. Platforms like Slack and Trello for example for communication, as well as Monday and Clickup for project management software, now make it easier than ever to help your teams connect, build their own knowledge databases and build better working relationships.