Numbers don’t lie: Engaged employees help brands win

Posted by Justin Goldsborough | 0 comments

Feb 07, 13

Employee communications is like that used Honda Civic you had in high school. It already had 100,000 miles on it, so you drove it hard, didn’t worry too much about timely oil changes, and car washes…what would have been the point? You wanted a new car like your friend Connie Damico. So instead of putting money into your current car, you saved up to buy something new as soon as you could.

Fast forward a few months. You got a new car, but it was a Yugo. And it ended up needing more maintenance than you thought. Pretty soon, you realized if you had just taken care of the Civic and shown it a little TLC, you would have had a better car, and more money to go with it.

You follow? Yeah, I’m not sure I do either. But it’s that whole “sometimes we don’t realize that the best things are right in front of us” mentality. That’s employee communications. Employees are a brand’s best customers. Best ambassadors. Best information resources. And yet the majority of companies throw money first into large marketing budgets and much smaller but still fairly large PR budgets to reach external audiences, leaving the scraps for their Honda Civics, I mean employees, back home at the corporate office.

I’ve always found this approach fascinating, because the numbers overwhelmingly say engaged employees equal more successful companies. And here are some of those numbers now (Source: Fleishman-Hillard employee comms trends presentation):

1. Companies with high-employee engagement experienced a 27.8 percent improvement in earnings per share (Towers Perrin-ISR study)
2. 72 percent of highly engaged employees believe they can positively affect customer service, versus 27 percent of the disengaged (Towers Perrin)
3. Engaged employees are more productive, more profitable, more customer focused, safer and more likely to withstand temptations to leave (Gallup)
4. 52 percent of organizations that adopt blogs, wikis and social networking tools achieved best-in-class performance levels, compared to 5 percent of organizations who do not use those tools (Web 2.0, Talent Management and Employee Engagement, Aberdeen Group)
5. Companies with highly effective communicators had 47 percent higher total returns to shareholders over the past five years than firms that are the least effective communicators (Towers Watson)
6. Companies where staff understand goals experience 24 percent higher shareholder return (Watson Wyatt)
7. Above-average engagement drove a 2 percent profit increase; conversely, below-average engagement drove a 1.4 percent profit dip (The Institute for Social Research)
8. Companies where employees are informed have fewer employees who are considering leaving or who are dissatisfied (Mercer)

The numbers don’t lie. My best friend in high school had a Civic. It finally died on the highway at around $250,000 miles…his senior year in college. All he did was take good care of it and show it some TLC.