Are endless hours spent analysing historic factors such as profitability, absenteeism, staff turnover and market share? While these are important factors, through which companies can “review the past, monitor the present and plan for the future”, they are essentially “lag performance indicators”.Research by Gallup demonstrates that organisations with high levels of engagement routinely outperform their competitors; they are 27% more profitable, they have 38% above average productivity and have 50% higher customer loyalty.
If this is the case, then wouldn’t company time be better spent focusing on developing employee engagement and measuring ‘lead indicators’ as well? “If employees are engaged and enjoying their work, the traditional ‘lag’ indicators are much more likely to improve as a result.”
It’s as simple as shifting the focus of a company’s key performance indicators from purely financial to a more holistic approach where by lead indicators such as employee engagement and client satisfaction are used to measure performance.
Employee engagement is widely agreed by business leaders and HR practitioners as one of the major drivers of business performance in fact most organisations now have it as a critical component of their strategic agenda. With challenging economic conditions, a hot recruitment market and skills shortages, the more engaged employees are the more productive they are and less likely to leave. Any business can benefit from understanding their engagement capability to identify the ripest areas for improvement and quickest route to enhancing engagement reality in a proactive manner, no matter whether they currently measure engagement or not.
By placing importance on key performance indicators that have a focus on the people who are directly involved with the business; employees and clients, rather than just numbers and figures on a spread sheet, a company becomes more balanced and allows employees to feel that they are an integral individuals working towards a united goal with the company. This balance reflects an approach that is centred on “the journey rather the destination”.
It makes sense that one of the outputs of a more engaged workforce will be increased levels of customer satisfaction which will, in turn, lead to an improvement in business results.
