OPINION: A simple formula for effective leadership
Employee engagement is the latest casualty of the lingering global recession according to a Towers Watson study of 1,300 US workers. Roger D'Aprix looks at what the possible repercussions of declining engagement scores means for organizations.
Employee engagement is the latest casualty of the lingering global recession according to a Towers Watson study of 1,300 US workers. The HR consulting firm reports that kneejerk leadership actions during 2008 and 2009 have had a devastating effect on both engagement levels and faith in leadership. The culprits were the usual suspects; ill-considered cost-cutting actions and downsizings by panicked leaders.
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Engagement levels, which were not robust to begin with, fell 9 percent for workers overall. That may not sound serious until you get behind the numbers and discover that the worst erosion was among top performers, who comprise the most highly engaged segment of the workforce.
In that elite group, engagement declined by 23 percent. They are 30 percent less convinced than they were before the recession that their employers "live up to the employment deal", claiming that leadership actions during the recession in cutting costs and restructuring have badly hurt the employee value proposition in their organizations. Two-thirds also complain that while performance expectations and workloads have increased, rewards for that performance are insufficient.
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This article was originally published in Strategic Communication Management.
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