Employee engagement is one of those topics that people can’t seem to get enough of.
There are a lot of reasons for that, but mainly, I think it is because a great many managers know that engagement is a good thing that would benefit their organizations but they simply don’t know how to get their workforce to buy in.
But in all the back-and-forth discussion about engagement, there’s one thing that seems to be perfectly clear: businesses are spending a big chunk of money trying to make it happen.
Bersin & Associates came out with a new report his month titled Employee Engagement: Market Review, Buyer’s Guide and Provider Profiles, and here is what jumped off the page at me:
The research shows that organizations currently invest approximately $720 million annually in engagement improvement, including both outsourced and internally developed programs. Only 50 percent of the potential market has been tapped, with half the organizations stating an interest in engagement programs actually investing.”
To put it more simply, organizations are spending nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars per year (emphasis added) trying to improve employee engagement — and that only represents about half of the $1.53 billion that Bersin projects that companies will eventually spend on it.
My take? Never has so much been spent on so very little.
Yes, $720 million is a lot of money to spend on employee engagement, especially when the most recent survey from Towers Watson shows that 63 percent of U.S. workers “are not fully engaged in their work and are struggling to cope with work situations that don’t provide sufficient support.”
Makes you wonder what organizations are getting for their $720 million, doesn’t it?
The Bersin report also gives other key trends when it comes to engagement that are worth noting, such as:
For my money, the fact that no one really knows how to define employee engagement is the real bottom line problem when it comes to trying to improve it. If you can’t define it, how the hell can you be expected to nurture and grow it among your employees?
This is just my 2 cents, but this report pinpoints a lot of the mindlessness in today’s American workplace when so much money is spent on improving something as critical employee engagement with such terrible results. Makes you want to get a t-shirt that says something like, “We Spent $700 million on Employee Engagement and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”
Until we get our hands around engagement — defining it, measuring it, appreciating it, leveraging it — we’ll simply be throwing more good money after bad chasing something that everyone knows is good to have but that most organizations don’t have the foggiest clue about how to generate.
The Bersin report, if we look at it closely, may be a good start that heads us in that direction.
Of course, there’s a lot more going on than just how much organization’s are spending to improve engagement in the news this week. Here are some HR and workplace-related items you may have missed. This is TLNT’s weekly round-up of news, trends, and insights from the world of talent management. I do it so you don’t have to.
