Does Employee Engagement Really Boost Business Growth?

“90% of organizations say employee engagement impacts business success, but 75% of organizations have no engagement plan or strategy.” - Accor Services

Companies are faced with so many priorities, from differentiating to win at customer experience to digital transformation to ensure customers have a positive experience interacting with their brands via their smart phones. But it’s important to remember that the customer experience starts when people begin interacting with your brand at any touch point. First impressions are lasting impressions.

Per the Accor Services finding, organizations clearly understand the role of employee engagement, but aren’t prioritizing it. Why, when higher levels of employee engagement correlate with better company performance? As Kevin Kruse’s visual depicts, companies with engaged employees will experience employees with a stronger customer orientation and higher levels of productivity and even satisfaction, which translates to lower employee turnover rates. And these companies will reap the rewards of higher customer satisfaction and loyalty and in turn meet their financial objectives of higher revenues and profits.

Source: Kevin Kruse, Employee Engagement: The Wonder Drug for Customer Satisfaction

Employee engagement is an important part of building a brand.

Brands thrive on satisfied customers, especially those highly influential ones who become ambassadors and promote the brands they love.

Brands that invest in employee engagement focus on a few key areas:

1 | Shared values: Organizations’ and employees’ values should align. Companies that hire employees who hold the same values and beliefs find these people thrive and best represent their brand.

2 | Develop a recognition system: Leading brands with a strong culture train and reward employees for demonstrating behaviors and actions representative of their company culture. Some systems involve both management and employees rewarding a peer for exemplary behavior. The system