Has the penny finally dropped amongst UK’s leaders?
Ask five Employee Engagement professionals
which key slides they’ll take along when pitching for a new client, and you
will most likely get five completely different answers. With one exception:
they will without doubt all include a slide that highlights the correlation
between high levels of engagement and business performance. The rationale being
that this is the main area where senior executives in organisations usually
need the most convincing.
Not anymore so it seems. Well, at least not
for the 40 odd high profile Senior Execs who each signed a letter to the Times,
headlined ‘The Importance of Employee Engagement to the UK’. In it they make a
number of interesting statements, the most striking being ‘Employee engagement
is good for individuals, good for business and good for UK growth. The evidence
is compelling.’ And when I say ‘striking’, by that I don’t of course mean that
this point hasn’t already been argued for a long, long time. But the main
difference here is that this time the message doesn’t come from Consultants who
have a service to sell, or Academics with a paper to publish; no, we are being
told so by the CEO’s of large UK companies such as M&S, BAE, Sainsbury’s
and John Lewis, to name but a few.
We shouldn’t underestimate the significance
of this moment. Firstly, knowing how important visible support from the top is
when trying to reach high levels of engagement, it is fantastic to see that
there are clearly a good number of large UK organisations where we can assume
this to be in place. That it may inspire those leaders who were – until now –
less convinced. And on the off-chance that one or two of the 44 names at the
bottom of the letter themselves don’t always practice what they preach, having
their names associated publically with a cause like this surely opens up interesting
avenues within their organisations.
But what is more, possibly for the first
time ever do business leaders make a case for employee engagement as a factor
that can have a macro economic impact. Yes we have all heard of engagement
improving individual companies, but linking it to the wider UK economy at large
is new. Well, new at this level at least. ‘Research suggests that £26bn in
added GDP could be realised’. £26 billion!!! Just think of how many government
cuts could be avoided if even just a fraction of this amount was realised!
Will it really make a difference? Of course
only time will tell, but as with anything that requires behavioural change,
getting visible support in ‘high places’ is never a bad thing. So us
professional s working in the area of employee engagement – whether within
organisations or as external advisors – lets seize this significant piece of
good news, and make sure it gets heard. Or to sign off with the authors of the
report: ‘We invite UK plc to join this movement for better engagement at work,
so we all raise our game to meet the challenges ahead’.
Ruud Jansen Venneboer
Managing Partner
Making Change Happen
