Employee Engagement: A Messy State Indeed - Only 1 in 3 Engaged says BlessingWhite

At some point business leaders must start to understand the importance of engagement!  I'm beginning to wonder if the concept will actually catch on as the single most important issue facing companies today as yet another significant research effort points to an awful state of affairs....

“The State of Employee Engagement 2008,” issued by global consultants BlessingWhite has found that fewer than one in three North American workers are fully engaged. Moreover, 19 percent are completely disengaged, and a further 13 percent are disillusioned and at risk for becoming disengaged.

Based on a survey of more than 7,500 employees and interviews with 40 human resource and line managers on four continents, the study identified five levels of employee engagement in the workforce.
There is a strong correlation between engagement and retention, said BlessingWhite CEO Christopher Rice. “For instance, we found that 85 percent of engaged employees plan to stay with their company during the year ahead. The study underlines the observation that engaged employees stay for what they give, while disengaged employees stay for what they get.”

Among the key findings were:

• There were no significant differences in engagement levels of men or women.
• Sectors with the largest number of engaged employees are HR consulting/training (46 percent), energy/utilities (40 percent), legal and business services (34 percent) and association/not-for-profit (34 percent).
• Industries with the fewest engaged are academia/higher education (23 percent), high technology (24 percent), chemicals (24 percent), retail (24 percent) and government (25 percent).
• Among functions, HR and sales departments have the most engaged (36 percent each), and finance and IT have the least (23 percent and 22 percent respectively).
• Virtual employees are slightly more engaged than their peers who work with their entire team present (34 percent vs. 28 percent).
• Engagement levels decrease somewhat as workforce size increases, with 32 percent of respondents from organizations of 1-999 employees compared with 25 percent in firms of more than 10,000 fully engaged.

It is time to face the music and start investing...the future of your business is at risk!