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Staff engagement secret behind top global businesses

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A motivated employee is more productive and loyal to the employer. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH

Kenyan companies that crack the code to achieve highly motivated and engaged employees are likely to secure notably higher customer ratings, profits of up to a fifth more than firms suffering low morale, and lower staff turnover, according to a raft of recent studies on staff engagement.

Research company Gallup found in a US survey, one of the biggest studies of employee engagement in the world, that companies scoring in the top half on staff engagement nearly doubled their odds of success compared to those in the bottom half.

“Researchers studied 49,928 work units, including nearly 1.4 million employees. It was observed that work units in the top quartile in employee engagement outperformed bottom-quartile units by 10 per cent on customer ratings, 22 per cent in profitability, and 21 per cent in productivity,” reported the research.

Work units in the top quartile also saw significantly less staff turnover, staff theft was reduced, at 25 per cent, and absenteeism to 37 per cent.

The difference borne of engaged employees has also given rise to sharp growth in the role of internal public relations (PR) in communicating, engaging and motivating staff, with debate also growing on the best approaches in genuinely engaging employees.

“Internal communication is an appropriate role of the public relation department to inform employees about corporate changes during times of change or crisis,” said researchers Aneil Mishra, Lois Boynton and Karen Mishra in an Institute for Public Relations study titled ‘Communications Driving Employee Engagement: The Expanded Role of Internal Communications’.

But PR practitioners report being handicapped on occasions in informing employees through a lack of access, themselves, to the key information.
In a case study titled ‘Public Relations as a Management Function and the Challenges to Effective Internal Public Relations at the Kerio Valley Development Authority in Kenya’, conducted by Stellah I.

Onyiego and published in the European Journal of Business and Management in 2014, it was found that poor internal communication in the organisation was due to a failure to acknowledge the role of the public relations officer by top management.

“The responses from the study revealed that 46.6 per cent of the respondents felt that public relations was part of management because the PRO communicated information from top management to the non-management employees. Another 46.6 per cent felt that because the PRO attended meetings with top management, he was part of the top management, while 6.8 per cent felt that PR was part of management because the PRO communicated directly with the top management.”

However the PRO revealed that the top company executives did not view the offer as holding a management function, contributing to poor internal public relations in the office.

“If the management starts including the PRO in all its meetings and allowing him to be involved in decision-making there will be an improvement in the internal public relations of the organisation,” reported Ms Onyiego.

However, with employee engagement still a relatively new endeavour, many companies report that communication remains top-down, according to the Institute of Public Relations study.

“The executives explained that employee engagement was a relatively new way for their firms to envision the communications role, and that their CEOs tend to communicate this perspective down to them. All participants believed that employees must feel they are contributing to the company’s goals in order to be engaged,” said the researchers.

This need for direct engagement and employee participation has spawned a set of tools that include questionnaires, face-to-face communication and surveys to interact with staff.

In this, the Institute of Public Relations’ respondents “identified a full-range of communication vehicles they used to implement these goals with employees, yet believed that face-to-face communication between an employee and their manager was the preferred and most effective channel, finding that it reduced turnover and promoted a sense of community among employees, thus fostering employee engagement.”

- African Laughter