Why Morale And Engagement Are Important For Improving Business Performance

Do Happy Staff = Happy Company ?

There is a mass of evidence explaining the link between how improving levels of employee engagement leads to improved employee performance and ultimately to improved business performance.

We firmly believe in this model, which has its roots in the 1997 publication - "The Service Profit Chain" (Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger).

'Engagement' is a tricky thing to define.

Many have tried. Everyone has a different definition.

It can be a mix of job satisfaction, motivation, morale, pride in your employer, loyalty to your colleagues, manager and team, likelihood to recommend your employer to a friend (prompted or unprompted), propensity to leave, desire to put in discretionary effort... the list goes on.

We take a more general view. We don't get hung up on trying to define engagement.

We know and you know that however you define it, it's a good thing to have. That's all you need to grasp, really.

The gist of the model and the empirical evidence is that by raising levels of employee engagement you improve business performance in 3 ways;

• highly engaged staff are more likely to work harder, smarter and more efficiently (improving productivity)
  
  
• highly engaged staff are significantly less likely to leave (reducing your recruitment / replacement costs)
  
  
• highly engaged staff will give better customer service, leading to more customer satisfaction (and greater customer revenues)

One of the most recent pieces of supporting evidence of the engagement / performance linkages was carried out in the UK. It's free to download: ‘Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement’

read about our Employee Survey work

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