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Employee engagement is the beating heart of any high-functioning business.
This isn’t just a case of keeping up general wellbeing or making the office pleasant; the ramifications felt by instituting stringent employee engagement strategies can very well be the difference between thriving, and fighting to survive – even for the most profitable of businesses. For example, whilst the most successful company in the world, Amazon, is still raking in the millions, the company has a serious employee engagement issue which has led to a torrent of media scrutiny, extremely high turnover and a work culture which has been described as 'toxic'.
Performance | Engagement for engagement's sake is pointless
An anonymous ex-Amazon employee recently told Forbes: “As someone who worked at Amazon headquarters in Seattle for over five years, I can tell you that it is an obscenely stressful place to work. I wouldn’t wish a job at Amazon on my worst enemy. Everyone I knew was on drugs for depression, drank too much and had severe sleeping problems — forget about having any life outside of Amazon, 75-plus hour work weeks are the norm. It’s absolutely brutal. I didn’t even realise how disgustingly abusive it was until I left.”
No, Amazon is not going to go bust due to these damming comments overnight, yet smaller companies may well break down due to the weight of such issues. 71% of leaders agreed that employee engagement is critical to success, according to FastTrack350, whilst Hubspot research found that 69% of employees said that they would work harder if they were better appreciated. Companies with high engagement are 21% more profitable and have 41% lower absenteeism, stated Gallup.
