Employee Enagement And Productivity

The flight Purser on our flight from Dubai to Entebbe earlier today came to welcome my wife and I on-board. I noticed she had a hand held device that provided our background information –previous flights, seat and meal preferences, etc. The Purser took her time and answered question I posed about Emirates in-flight crew selection criteria, interview process, type and duration of training, etc.

Earlier the ground staff at the check-in counter directed that I take all seven passports of my family and after identifying each one, said ‘’have them take a seat across, we will only need you during the check-in process’’. Here again, I asked a few questions about Emirates employee selection process and training. The attendant mentioned that she observed that Emirates recruited a lot staff from the hospitality industry because ‘’we know how to smile’’.

In the two encounters above, I thought it is one thing to have a service process designed it is quite another thing to have engaged employees execute the process to customer satisfaction. So does the level of engagement of the employee affect how the service is delivered or the overall productivity of the team?

I did not have to look for answers. In a recent study, Gallup Organization examined 49 publicly traded companies with Earnings Per Share (EPS) data available from 2008-2012 and Q12 (the Gallup Employee engagement instrument) data available from 2010 and or 2011 in its database and found that organizations with a critical mass of engaged employees outperformed their competition, compared with those that did not maximize their employees potential.

 Kevin Kruse, author of Employee Engagement for Everyone, referenced a study that was published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology organizational commitment has more impact on business unit performance than vice versa. Researchers Silvan Winkler, Cornelius König and Martin Kleinmann used both a longitudinal design and looked at the organizational commitment of 755 retail bank employees from 2005—2008, along with financial performance and customer satisfaction of the business units they worked in. The study showed that indeed there is a reciprocal relationship between job attitudes and business performance within a one-year time frame, but when the time frame is increased to two or three years the correlation only remained in the direction of engagement preceding business outcomes. They write:

Results indicated that organizational commitment had a more persistent influence on performance at the business unit level than vice versa. Consistent with prior research, this suggests that job attitudes may come first, and that practitioners might be well advised to aim to improve job attitudes in order to boost performance.

According to Kruse, this study looked at the size of the effect (i.e., the strength of engagement) on customer satisfaction. Using a binomial effect size display for the link between engagement and subsequent customer satisfaction the findings were r = .43.
To put this effect size into perspective for everyday practitioners, it can be compared to the effect sizes of many drugs as reported in the journal, American Psychologist:

• Chemotherapy and breast cancer survival: r = .03
• Antibiotics and the cure for pediatric ear pain: r = .08
• Smoking and incidence of lung cancer within 25 years: r = .08
• Effect of ibuprofen on pain reduction: r = .14
• Alcohol and aggressive behavior: r = .23
• Sleeping pills and improvement in insomnia: r = .30
• Viagra and improved male sexual functioning: r = .38
• Employee engagement and customer satisfaction: r = .43

Indeed, the authors make a direct comparison, “the correlation between male consumption of Viagra and sexual performance has been calculated to be r = .38…which is similar to the relationship between employee commitment and subsequent 1-year customer satisfaction.”

No wonder companies like Southwest Airlines and luxury hotel Four Seasons emphasise creating an engaged workforce to achieve the level of superior customer service that they consistently provide.

To be clear, the customer experience still rule but it takes engaged employees to make the magical happen. According to Gallup, engaged employees are the best colleagues. They cooperate to build an organization, institution, or agency, and they are behind everything good that happens there. These employees are involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work. They know the scope of their jobs and look for new and better ways to achieve outcomes. They are 100% psychologically committed to their work. And, they are the only people in an organization who create new customers.

On the other hand, Gallup says, not engaged workers can be difficult to spot: They are not hostile or disruptive. They show up and kill time with little or no concern about customers, productivity, profitability, waste, safety, mission and purpose of the teams, or developing customers. They are thinking about lunch or their next break. They are essentially “checked out.” Surprisingly, these people are not only a part of your support staff or sales team, but they are also sitting on your executive committee.

 Actively disengaged employees are more or less out to damage their company. They monopolize managers’ time; have more on the-job accidents; account for more quality defects; contribute to “shrinkage,” as theft is called; are sicker; miss more days; and quit at a higher rate than engaged employees do. Whatever the engaged do — such as solving problems, innovating, and creating new customers — the actively disengaged try to undo.

 And here is the troubling part, in the US, 70% of its estimated 100 million workforces is either not engaged or actively disengaged. With 30% most of the innovating and delivering on customer satisfaction, it is clear if we want dramatically increase our service experience feedback like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) then we must provide the leadership to drive higher levels of employee engagement.

 So where do you start? According to Professor Harter, Chief Scientist at Gallup, one way to simplify it is to focus on purpose. Communicate the purpose of the organization, and how employees’ individual purposes fit into that purpose. When employees “clearly know their role, have what they need to fulfil their role, and can see the connection between their role and the overall organizational purpose,” says Harter, that’s the recipe for creating greater levels of engagement.