With many companies downsizing and moving forward, there is becoming a growing need to ensure that their is proper employee engagement where employees kept on board are not just satisfied, but actively engaged with the work they do.
Ensuring the right, engaged people are on the staff, can effectively improve the profitability of a company, right from the start.
Studies have shown that engaged employees take fewer sick days and short-term absences, yield a lower staff turnover, and generate higher productivity. Smarter working practices, will lead to lower costs and reduced duplication of effort. It’s also been proven that engaged employees also help to create higher sales and revenue growth through increased customer confidence and loyalty.
Charlotte Gallagher, founder and managing director of P3 People Management, is an expert on ’employee engagement’, and has spoken to Property Aspects Magazine about how to gauge employees, while also warning that it should not be confused with ’employee satisfaction’.
“Many companies try and implement an employee engagement project to see how committed and engaged their workforce is. The problem with many of these surveys is that the people designing the survey use questions that may sound good, many also just make the questions up, off the top of their head. But the questions have not stood up, under research. The surveys also often look like employee satisfaction surveys, which ask questions about pay and the parking facilities.”
“At P3 we use the “Q12” employee engagement survey, which is based on extensive research by the Gallup organisation. They argue that there are no great companies but there are great workgroups.
They established, after years of research, that the groups that had high employee retention, high customer service, high productivity and high profits, also had high levels of employee engagement, and they consistently answered “strongly agree” to certain questions.”
“After the survey we are able to determine who is engaged; working with passion and feeling a strong connection to the company, not-engaged; employees who are sleepwalking through their work day, or actively disengaged; Employees that aren’t just unhappy at work, they’re busy acting out their unhappiness.
Every day, the ‘actively disengaged’ undermine what their engaged co-workers accomplish. From this point we can then help build an action plan on how to get all employees engaged.”
P3’s team of HR consultants boast a collective experience of over 55 years. Property Aspects appreciates the contribution of their Founder and Managing Director Charlotte Gallagher.
For more on Q12 and how you can tackle employee engagement, call 0161 941 2426 or email charlotte@p3pm.co.uk
