Employee Engagement By the Numbers

Sometimes we like to be storytellers here at MashTank, and other times we just want to drill down to the facts off the bat. We are a data-driven business, after all. This time, let’s jump straight into the numbers that business leaders are eager to learn: 

• Employee engagement (a measurement of things like profitability, productivity, retention, and overall well-being as conducted by Gallup) across industries dropped in 2021 for the first time in a decade.  
• Where we once saw that 36% of workers were engaged, we dropped to 34% in 2021 (and 36% wasn’t exactly a winning number to begin with). 
• One of the biggest areas where this percentage point dropped was in clarity of roles and expectations in the grander scheme of the company. 
• That is, the percentage of employees that strongly agreed their leader kept them informed about what is going on in the organization dropped from 49% to 36%. 

So, not only are only one-third of workers healthily engaged in their work, but only one-third feel their team leaders knew or communicated company strategy to them. 

And if we look at another credible survey, we see even less leeway: ADPRI reported that, 

“Only about 16% of employees are Fully Engaged, and this number has not changed much since 2015. This means that 84% of workers are just Coming to Work instead of contributing all they could to their organizations.” 

Why does this matter? 

Well, let’s take off the most basic human hat for a moment, the one where we care about people and their well-being and their life goals, and look at harder facts: companies with less engaged employees are less productive, less profitable, less healthy, have higher turnover, and aren’t growing sustainably (if at all).  

And of course, there are about a million and one people you can bring in that say they improve employee engagement. What they can’t do, however, as much as we respect some of these consultants, is quantify how you’re doing in hard numbers –> followed by providing the longer range tactical planning and steps to improve, PLUS how these “soft” efforts will affect your “hard” bottom line.  

The status quo has left businesses treading water with these often-nebulous issues (whether that be engagement, employee trust, or something else) and gasping for air via things like raised compensation and benefits. But there’s another way.

There’s a way to measure: 

• Employee engagement 
• Employee trust 
• Employee belief in their management 
• Clarity of roles and expectations 
• Workplace pride 
• Alignment to strategy 

And what you can measure, you can finally improve. 

Like we said, as a data-driven company, we like to pay attention to the numbers and let the story tell itself. But there’s a clear story unfolding in 2022: The businesses that survive and thrive will be those that put data to their promises and take action in truly caring about their people. Because workforces have never been as capable and as incentivized to leave traditional jobs as they are today, and leaders have more power than they think to reverse that.