We’ve talked a lot about the importance of employee satisfaction in recruitment and retention efforts. Turnover and hiring are expensive, and companies can’t afford to keep losing their staff over low levels of satisfaction. However, there is a strong argument in favor of promoting employee satisfaction on the flip side as well.
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Satisfaction Leads to High Performance
While employees with low levels of satisfaction are more likely to leave a company, companies whose employees have high levels of satisfaction are more likely to outperform their competition.
While this is intuitively apparent, Alexander Huls, a contributor to The Hartford, puts some numbers behind this intuition and provides some tips on how to improve employee engagement.
Huls cites the book The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want, which found that when companies value and actively cultivate high employee morale, they tend to outperform their competition by 20%.
Investing in Boosting Morale
This is an interesting finding because it puts some objective and concrete value behind company efforts to boost employee morale. Many companies may realize that there must be some value behind having high employee morale, but without being able to quantify it, it may seem like a “nice to have” item instead of a necessary and useful investment.
If this is the case, efforts to boost employee morale might be some of the first things to go when companies face the need to cut costs.
Employers are generally aware that employee morale is a positive attribute for any organization. But, being able to identify the concrete value of boosting morale can make the investments required—time and money—more justifiable as a business expense.
As noted above, Huls not only points out this objective measurement but also offers some tips on how to boost employee morale. We’ll review those in a follow-up post.