This particular case study is an additional support to The Evidence Paper
Over the past few years Kenexa have been working in partnership with a global financial services organisation with a European head office. It generates a multi-billion Euro net income and has over 100,000 employees.
Background of Employee Engagement
This organisation is committed to engagement programmes as part of their HR and People Strategies to deduce valuable insight on engagement and its impact on business performance. The engagement programme incorporates numerous linkage studies across HR metrics and business metrics each year. Through research they have demonstrated a strong linkage between employee engagement and a number of organisational outcomes.
Furthermore, this on-going analysis is an important component for their planning, strategy alignment and future HR initiatives.
Employee Engagement Results
The correlation analysis completed by Kenexa in 2011 included 41 large business units. Results showed that business units with higher engagement performed at higher levels of revenue with each employee generating 2.4 times more gross revenue than in the low engaged business units.
They found that the greatest gains in performance are achieved when business units reach high levels of engagement: moving from low to average engagement is not as impactful as moving from average to high engagement.
In addition, as a predictor of employee motivation, engagement is strongly related to commitment to the company. Their research showed that there is a difference of 6 percentage points in labour turnover between employees with low engagement (19 per cent) and those with high engagement (13 per cent).
They further found that low engagement led to negative employee consequences such as increased time off work due to illness. They reported that less engaged teams experienced up 50 per cent more absence from work than those teams that are highly engaged. This equated to 66,640 days (275 FTE) lost through low engagement.
