'Sharing power, not ‘communicating at’ people, is the most effective way of engaging employees to improve business performance. This is one of the major findings of the largest-ever survey of employee engagement in the UK. Engage Group commissioned YouGov to survey 23,585 people across Great Britain in October 2008, including 2,500 board-level executives – 2,000 of them from FTSE 500 companies.
The study’s findings establish a direct relationship between an organisation’s financial performance and the extent to which employees are engaged to perform. It also unearths a set of ‘new world’ elements of successful engagement, which define a radical new approach to getting the best out of employees.
“We now have definitive data that say people become more engaged when they are more closely involved with decision-making – both every day and at the point of change,” says John Smythe, deputy chairman of Engage Group. “Performance is better when they are engaged and change is better managed.”
The survey shows that while most boardrooms see engagement as a key priority, most employees currently feel disengaged from their organization. Moreover, fewer than one in four employees view their leaders as effective. Engage Group’s research builds on Boot camp or Commune, a study undertaken by Smythe with McKinsey & Company in 2004.
“We interviewed leaders in 60 organizations around the world and deduced that there were 28 drivers of employee engagement,” says Smythe. “But the most potent driver was the appetite and ability of leaders at every level to share power – to improve the quality of decisions and their speed of execution. This thesis has been robustly confirmed by the YouGov research.
“It has profound implications for the employer proposition and for leadership – replacing command-and-control management with the ability to govern and liberate the creativity of others,” he adds. “It’s simply not enough for managers to make a decision, then just pick up the phone to their internal comms people and expect them to communicate it.”
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