We’ve rounded up our favorite 2019 employee engagement quotes from our clients and partners, and a remarkable thing happens when you gather everyone’s feedback together (as our clients know).
You see patterns, and when you track that feedback over time, you might even see trends. Here’s what we saw in 2019.
2019 was The Year of Realizing Just How Good Communication Can Be
Engagement Multiplier is as much a communication tool as an employee engagement tool because the two are inextricable. As communication improves, so does engagement, which is why it is so important to give employees a platform to voice concerns, ask questions, and contribute suggestions.
Clear communication is more than just providing a place for your employees to share feedback and knowing what’s going on day-to-day. 80% of employees feel more engaged at work when they understand the company’s goals, strategies, values, etc. (IBM), but only 40% of the workforce reports knowing these things (Bain).
Here’s what our clients and partners had to say about the impact improving communication is having on their organizations and clients’ businesses.
“With Engagement Multiplier one of our clients realized that there was a genuine friction point between what the leadership team thought and what employees thought. At the leader-level, they weren’t communicating the purpose of the business in a way that the employees understood. That opened up a whole layer of training opportunities around line managers, how they communicate, and how they could understand the purpose themselves to make it real for their teams.”
– Crispin Manners
CEO, ONVA Consulting
Chairman, Employee Engagement Alliance (UK)
Authorized Engagement Multiplier Partner
“Over the years, we have tried numerous times to agree on our direction as an organisation, but if I am honest, this has at times increased the tension.
Engagement Multiplier has enabled us to bring some of the internal tensions and differences to the surface in an open and non-confrontational way. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that reading some of the feedback from our staff was a sobering experience, but it’s certainly made the owners and leaders think critically about our direction.”
– Martin Rigley
Managing Director, Lindhurst Engineering
“We’ve had great responses from our survey. We were really happy and really proud that so many people were willing to share what they wanted and what they didn’t want us to do.
We’ve also been able to understand what our management is like, how we deliver messages to people, how we can engage with staff better, and that’s something that we probably don’t understand sometimes, and this has really given us great feedback to let us know that.”
– Michael Bell
CEO, AvailableCar
“Engagement Multiplier has changed the way we look at staff surveys: it is a powerful new way to interact with our people on a continual basis. The fact that it takes place not just once a year, and is a two-way communication tool, means that many insights have been shared, comments and concerns have been individually addressed, and we have been able to improve our operation in myriad small ways since launching the initiative.”
– Jannes Sorensen
General Manager, The Beaumont
“One of my clients has been able to get lots of ideas to help the efficiency in the way that they run their business. They’ve been able to listen to what the staff was saying. One of the directors says, ‘It takes away the mystery of wondering what people are thinking.’ So if you’ve got a business and you want to find out what your staff are thinking and you want to engage them more in the business and be able to do that not just once, but every quarter, and see the engagement grow with your business, then Engagement Multiplier is the tool I would suggest using. I’ve used it with many of my clients. We’re getting some fantastic results.”
– Emerson Patton
Business & Leadership Coach, ActionCOACH
2019 was also The Year of Seeing the ROI of Investing in People
$11 Billion is lost annually due to employee turnover. (Bureau of National Affairs)
Business coaches and industry leaders have long extolled the virtues of investing in your employees – their well-being, their satisfaction, their happiness, their health, and their education. But, as new technologies emerge that allow us to track the ROI of those efforts far better than ever before, business owners are seeing the impact of their investments in a whole new light. And they are very excited.
In fact, according to the Workplace Research Foundation, active employee engagement programs in an organization can result in increased profits up to $2,400 per employee annually.
Here are the results our clients and partners are seeing from investing in employee engagement.
“In July we had zero turnover. That was huge. Now we’ve increased salaries and we hired a whole bunch of rock stars, which is really, really exciting. And a lot of them were based around those core values that we identified in the engaged purpose piece of the survey. The owners are just beside themselves happy because everybody comes into work now really excited to be there instead of wondering what drama is going to be stirred during the day.”
– Amy Riccardi
CEO, Leadership Evolution Group
“We are over the moon to be involved with such a project and look forward to seeing our engagement scores increase in the coming months. If we prevent one staff member from leaving or produce the changes that people would like to see then I see Engagement Multiplier being a massive benefit to other care organisations. We love it!”
– Karen Jarritt
Director & Head of People, Allied Care
“Engagement Multiplier is a game changer. And I say that as a veteran of almost every survey option that we have utilised having fostered disappointment, frustration and inertia. It is not onerous for the staff to complete, it’s revelatory in its results, and offers a tangible guide to management as to what is necessary to fully engage its most precious asset – the workforce. The 90-day frequency means it is a dynamic tool, rather than retrospective, and the participants feel involved in the future of the company. . . I have never before truly felt that I knew the wishes of my staff so incontrovertibly.”
– Jeremy King
CEO, Corbin & King
Businesses in 2019 Were More Data-Driven than Ever
“Data-driven” is a trend that’s been growing over the past decade, and we predict it will grow even more in the next as our capabilities to track meaningful data improves. Today, we’ve achieved awareness that key performance indicators should be identified and tracked, but there are still precious few businesses that actually manage to do it. Having the awareness, desire, and capability to track employee engagement metrics makes our clients true leaders.
“Over the years I’ve seen leaders of businesses need tangible proof that investment in people makes a difference, and one of the really neat things about Engagement Multiplier is it gives very quick data, which is number-oriented. For the average CEO, the fact that they can track an improving score very quickly, they really like that.”
– Crispin Manners
CEO, ONVA Consulting
Chairman, Employee Engagement Alliance (UK)
Authorized Engagement Multiplier Partner
“The world of hospitality is driven by numbers and measurement. We have financial tools to measure business performance; we have tools to measure our reputation. Engagement Multiplier is the missing piece of the jigsaw and has provided us with the capability to make informed effective decisions based on honest scores and feedback from our teams.”
– Andrew Stembridge
Executive Director, Iconic Hotels
“The other great thing about Engagement Multiplier is the data that it’s giving you. Most of the time, you go with gut instinct and react to what you think is happening, but you can actually put a number into where you’re positioned. It really gives you value as to what your company is doing and where you’re standing.”
– Michael Bell
CEO, AvailableCar
“I think for a CEO, it’s a lonely place at the best of times and sometimes you don’t have insight as to what the team is doing or what the team is thinking. Actually having the ability to look at the trends from across the business, whether that’s the groupings, the employees, the team as a whole, the individual, the relationship with customers, the ability to sell, the purpose of the organisation, the leadership and management. When you can start to structure and see across all of these different dynamic areas, it has a massive impact. Now for a CEO, that’s got to be good in terms of decision making, in terms of creating an empowering environment and culture.”
– Steve Gaskell
Business Coach & High Performance Coach, ActionCOACH
“Everything about my business is about people. And at the heart of Engagement Multiplier is making people happy. And that’s what motivates me. I work with businesses to increase engagement and I had been looking for quite a while for a tool to be able to accurately measure that. So when I was introduced to the Engagement Multiplier, I was particularly excited because not only do we measure it, but we can increase and multiply it.”
– Tracey Powiesnik
Director, Coach & Trainer, Core Process
Authorized Engagement Multiplier Partner
What does this mean for 2020?
If 2019 paved the way for better communication, realizing the ROI of investing in human capital, and tracking data to continually improve – we think the sky is the limit for engaged organizations in 2020.
Our clients and partners are leading these trends because they are brave enough to listen to their employees and wise enough to commit to taking action.
