Report: Employee Engagement Benchmark Study

We just published a new Temkin Group report, Employee Engagement Benchmark Study. The analysis uncovers a strong connection between employee engagement and customer experience as well as between employee engagement and productivity.

Here’s the executive summary:

Employee engagement is one of the four customer experience core competencies and it’s the one that companies tend to struggle with the most. To examine this critical area, we surveyed more than 2,400 U.S. employees. Here are some highlights of the findings: only 40% of employees are fully committed to helping their companies succeed, 54% will do something good for the company even if it’s not expected, and 26% are likely to look for a new job within six months. We also introduced the Temkin Employee Engagement Index (TEEI) based on how employees feel about three areas: understanding the company mission, feeling that their feedback is valued, and having the required training and tools. Using the TEEI, we found that only 31% of employees are highly engaged. These highly engaged employees are a real asset; they’re 5.8 times more committed to helping their companies succeed and 4.7 times more likely to recommend that someone apply for a job at their company. It turns out that companies with good customer experience have 2.5 times more engaged employees than companies with poor customer experience.

Download report for $195

To gauge the level of employee engagement across respondents, we used the Temkin Employee Engagement Index (TEEI), which is based on how much employees agree with three statements:

1. I understand the overall mission of my company
2. My company asks for my feedback and acts upon my input
3. My company provides me with the training and the tools that I need to be successful

Using the TEEI results from the 2,435 respondents, our analysis uncovered a number of interesting items. Here’s a graphic I put together to summarize some of the key data in the report:

The report highlights four recommendations:

• Make employee engagement an executive priority.
• Measure employee engagement.
• Create employee engagement task force.
• Embed employee engagement into the HR fabric.

Download report for $195

The bottom line: Employee engagement is critical for long-term (and short-term) success

Happy Employees Create Better Customer Experiences

As I discuss in my eBook The 6 Laws Of Customer Experience: Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers. If you want to differentiate your customer experience, then improve your relationship with employees.

That’s why I want to give a shout-out to these 100 companies (led by SAS, Edward Jones, Wegmans, Google, and Nugget Market) that Fortune Magazine ranked as the best companies to work for.

It’s no coincidence that I’ve written about customer experience best practices from many of these firms.

The bottom line: A good goal is to appear on, or move up on, this list.

The 4 Key Ingredients Of Great Organizations

I’m an avid student of business. One of my ongoing personal goals is to better understand what drives consistent success at large organizations. 

Over the years, I’ve read many great theories about how companies perform including Discipline of Market Leaders by Treacy and Wiersema, the 7-S framework from Waterman and Peters, Strategic Intent and Core Competencies by Prahalad and Hamel, Good To Great by Collins, and a number by Michael Porter: Five Forces, Strategic Fit, and Value Chain.

As I discussed in the post Fundamental Flaws In Management Education, the business world has changed. And while all of those models provide valuable insights, they don’t fully capture what makes companies successful today. 

In this environment, companies need to evolve into what I call an Aligned Enterprise which I’ve defined as:

An organization that acts cohesively and embraces change in its environment.

I’ve identified 4 key characteristics of an Aligned Enterprise (which I refer to as P.A.C.E.):

1. Purposeful leadership. Establishing and maintaining a clear and compelling vision for where the organization is heading and why it’s going in that direction.
2. Adaptive design. Infusing the realities of the marketplace (customers, suppliers, technology change, etc.) into the creation and evolution of products, services, and processes.
3. Customer-connectedness. Incorporating customer insight, feedback, and participation throughout the entire organization. 
    Customer-responsiveness. Increasing the magnitude and speed with which an organization learns from, and responds to, customer feedback.
4. Employee engagement. Building strong commitment from employees through alignment of hiring, on-boarding, training, coaching, communications, and incentive programs.

I’ll write more about Aligned Enterprise in future posts. Before I do, I’d love to hear what you think about the model. Does it resonate with you? Is there anything missing? What examples would you point to? 

The bottom line: How well is your organization keeping PACE?