Engaged Employees Inspire Company Innovation

Gallop Management Journal surveyed U.S. employees to discover what effect employee engagement may have on team-level innovation and customer service delivery . Gallup researchers studied employee responses to several items about innovation in the workplace to see which factors differed most strongly among engaged employees (29% of respondents) and those who were not engaged (56%) or actively disengaged (15%).

Gallup research has shown that engaged employees are more productive, profitable, safer, create stronger customer relationships, and stay longer with their company than less engaged employees. This latest research indicates that workplace engagement is also a powerful factor in catalyzing “outside-the-box” thinking to improve management and business processes as well as customer service.

The study also showed that engaged workers were much more likely to react positively to creative ideas offered by fellow team members. When asked to rate their level of agreement with the statement “I feed off the creativity of my colleagues,” roughly 6 in 10 engaged employees (61%) strongly agreed, while only about 1 in 10 actively disengaged employees (9%) gave the same answer. This suggests that higher levels of employee engagement not only increase the likelihood that individual employees will generate new ideas, it also suggests that idea generation among engaged employees can be amplified when it occurs in a team setting.

Can employees be engaged today ?

Unemployment is stuck at 9.5 percent, with an additional 7 percent of Americans either holding in part-time positions or no longer looking for work and thus no longer even counted as unemployed. A grim new noun has entered the lexicon—”99ers,” people whose 99 weeks of extended jobless benefits have all run dry. No wonder the vast majority of people who have jobs aren’t about to give up a steady paycheck, no matter what indignities are visited upon them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t secretly ready to explode. “The Jet Blue flight attendant who inflated a slide and ran off his aircraft tapped into a vein of anger that a lot of people have toward their employers,” says John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement firm. “They are mad about all the layoffs they’ve gone through at work. They are mad about having their benefits cut.”

Last year, according to the federal government, worker productivity climbed 3.5 percent as companies shed millions of employees and figured out ways to get more work from those who remained. It was the biggest increase in six years—and great for corporate profits. It was considerably less great for workplace morale. According to Towers Watson (TW), a benefits consulting firm, employee engagement, or loyalty, declined by 9 percent in 2009. Until the recovery picks up, however, those disengaged workers are staying on.

Tags: Innovation

This entry was posted on February 8, 2012 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Working in corporate America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.