Chances are most of you reading this discovered our blog through one of our stats pages: Employee engagement and loyalty, the 2016 version, or Millennial employee engagement stats.
Which is great. We put a lot of work into those and consider it a service to the HR and management communities.
But, whoa, each of those has a LOT of data.
Maybe too much.
While most people hit those pages looking for a specific piece of data, there are many who seek answers to bigger questions.
"What kind of benefits are employees wanting?"
"What are other companies doing to engage employees?"
"Are Millennials really disloyal?"
We (and our stat collections) may not be able to answer all the big questions, but we couldn't help but notice a few recurring themes.
So we wrote a piece for TLNT.com that calls out the biggest takeaways from two years of extensive data curation.
The TLNT article is nothing to sneeze at, coming in at nearly 2,000 words. If you're more of the summary type, consider these highlights. For more in depth discussion of each of these, hit the subscribe button on the sidebar, as we'll be covering them further in the coming weeks.
Yeah, they're content to show up, do their job, then get on with real life. They're not necessarily "engaged," nor are they "actively disengaged." That's okay for some roles, but for leadership and management roles "content" won't be enough.
There are two big risks with content employees: an office with too many of them will struggle to excel beyond basic requirements, and they're prone to churn out with minimal persuasion.
The day-to-day engagement and long-term success of your employees is in the hands of their direct supervisors. Compensation, employee perks and benefits, and overall corporate mission all play a role in bringing people to an organization, but each takes a backseat to managers post-hire.
We're all at the mercy of managers, for better or worse. The big risk: it's clear that many managers aren't engaged with their organizations.
People aren't getting the benefits of vacationing - and neither are employers. People perform better when they're able to truly unplug for a few days, but that's something most people won't do.
It's not always the employer's fault. People convince themselves they'll fall behind or jeopardize their position if they don't work while out of the office.
But you have an opportunity to put their minds at ease by encouraging people to get out of the office and unplug without worry.
For more in-depth discussion of this topic, check out this article.
People are taking home as much as 25% less than they did 10 years ago. It's not always the fault of employers, though. The biggest shift in expenses has come from rising health premiums. That's thousands of dollars they're looking to make up elsewhere.
Plus, people are willing to leave their jobs for corporate perks and non-traditional benefits like flex working. Salary is still important, but employees are willing to make tradeoffs for a better work/life balance.
This is what it all boils down to, isn't it? The data has never been clearer: an engaged workforce results in more engaged customers, higher revenue, and lower costs.
Yet most organizations don't even have employee engagement among their corporate goals. It's why we have just 34% of US employees who consider themselves engaged.
That means the organizations that do take engagement seriously have a competitive advantage.
We highly recommend you check out the full article on TLNT, which includes dozens of data points that led us to these conclusions. And if you think the data is wrong, or you have a different interpretation, please let us know in the comments here or there!