Report: New Data on the Value of an Engaged Workforce

Getting our team members to be connected, invested, and engaged at work is more difficult than ever. Bottom line: people aren’t that engaged at work.

This report, in partnership with Lighthouse Research & Advisory, draws on responses from over 1,000 workers and employers to demonstrate key priorities to create real engagement in the workplace today. Chock full of eye-opening new data, compelling analyses, and powerful company stories, leaders can leverage this report to drive high engagement and meaningful business results.

Enjoy an excerpt of the report below, or download the entire report.

Today’s employee engagement reality

Getting our team members to be connected, invested, and engaged at work is more difficult than ever. There’s no shortage of social media content depicting people working in challenging environments or with unreasonable demands, and with viral videos showing a chronic lack of disengagement, some employers may worry that engaging their workers is hopeless. 

The good news is that there are also organizations that are overcoming the odds and creating authentically engaging workplaces where people love to come to work every day. We’ll talk more about how that’s accomplished, but first it’s worth noting why the workforce engagement disconnect is occurring.  

For starters, there’s a tremendous amount of change that has happened in the workplace in recent years. Many organizations had to adapt to remote work for the first time, and a number of them are still debating the optimal hybrid schedules to balance worker satisfaction and leadership demands. Not only that, but a strained economy, inflation, persistent layoffs, and other factors have caused no small amount of stress on the average employee. 

Overall, the series of waves that the pandemic began have rippled through the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, the Great Regret, and other eloquent phrases that mainly boil down to the same thing: people aren’t that engaged at work. The truth is that engagement is more important than ever, but how we do it is the critical differentiator for many organizations. 

Nine out of 10 employers told us in our research that it’s more important to know who is engaged during times of economic uncertainty. That’s likely because disengagement is a problem that costs employers more than a third of an employee’s salary, according to Gallup data. When you scale those numbers across the workforce, it paints a sobering picture. But as one expert puts it, this is a preventable issue:

Disengagement is not an inexpensive problem--it's a real problem with real tangible impact. But the beauty of it, the silver lining, is that it's a controllable problem. It does not have to be this way.
-Debra Squyres, Chief Customer Officer, Bonusly

Survey says...

With that reality in mind, this report draws on responses to our recent Performance, Engagement, Culture, and Employee Experience studies of 1,000 workers and 1,077 employers to demonstrate some of the key priorities, areas of focus, and opportunities to create real engagement in the workplace today. This includes focus areas like: 

• The way engagement weaves through the culture, workforce, and company performance
• The area with the highest probability for driving worker engagement
• What employers are doing today to create engaged teams
• And more

In addition, we’ll feature a case study of Wolfe, an organization whose leadership has the right mindset and approach to creating and driving a culture that every team member can visualize and pursue on a daily basis. 

The disengaged, disconnected workforce is a big problem, but it’s also a massive opportunity. Turning around even a fraction of those workers from disengaged to highly engaged creates real, tangible results in their performance and organizational performance as well. Let’s find out how.

[Read the Report]