Report: Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2014

We just published a Temkin Group report, Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2014. This is the third year that we’ve published the benchmark of U.S. employees. (Take a look at our Employee Engagement Resource Page).

Here’s the executive summary:

We used the Temkin Employee Engagement Index to analyze the engagement levels of more than 5,000 U.S. employees, and we found that employee engagement has decreased over last year. As highly engaged employees try harder, recommend the company, help others, and take less sick time, this trend should be troubling for companies. However, employee engagement levels vary across different organizations, industries, and individuals. Companies that outperform their peers in financial performance and customer experience enjoy a considerably more engaged work force. Our research also shows that the real estate sector has the most engaged employees of any industry, while public administration has the fewest.  Additionally, we found that highly engaged employees tend to be frontline employees, high-income earners, and male. Given the significant value of engaged employees, we recommend that companies improve this area by using our Five I’s of Employee Engagement: Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve, and Incent.

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Here’s what we found when we examined year-over-year results for the Temkin Employee Engagement Index:

Here are some other findings from the research:

• When compared with disengaged employees, highly engaged employees are more than three times as likely to do something good for their employer even if it’s not expected of them, almost three times as likely to make a recommendation about an improvement at work, more than 2.5 times as likely to stay late at work if something needs to be done, and more than two times as likely to help someone else at work.
• Companies that have significantly better customer experience than their peers have almost 2.5 times the percentage of highly or moderately engaged compared with companies with customer experience that lags their competitors.
• Companies that have significantly better financial performance than their peers have more than 1.5 times the percentage of highly or moderately engaged compared with companies with financial performance that lags their competitors.
• Temkin Group found the largest decline in engagement with the youngest group of employees in the study, those between 18 and 24 years old.
• About 60% of employees in companies with 100 employees or less are moderately or highly engaged compared with only 49% of employees at companies with more than 10,000 employees.
• We examined employee engagement across 14 industries. At the high-end, 72% of employees in the real estate, rental and leasing industry are moderately or highly engaged. At the bottom of the list, 44% of employees in public administration are moderately or highly engaged.
• Fifty-nine percent of employees that always interact with customers are at least moderately engaged while only 42% of employees that never interact with customers are equally engaged.
• Nearly 80% of executives are at least moderately engaged, compared with only 46% of individual contributors.
• Across all age groups except for those older than 64, males are equally or more engaged than females. The largest gender gap is with 25- to 34-year-olds.

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The bottom line: Improving employee engagement remains a key opportunity for organizations