Employee engagement is a hot topic at the moment. Not the kind that comes before employee marriage, but engagement in the sense of employees genuinely feeling part of their organisation, and so willingly putting heart and soul into their work.
These employees are passionate about the work that they do, and promote their organisation to others. In short, they are the stuff of which managers dream.
Researchers around the world have considered this for years, asking questions such as: "What differences do engaged employees really make to my business?", and, "Can ordinary employees become engaged employees?"
We would expect that organisations with a greater proportion of engaged employees should outperform organisations with many lackadaisical workers.
Global research by the Kenexa High Performance Institute shows that this is indeed the case - organisations in the top quartile on the Kenexa employee engagement measure have nearly twice the annual net income of those in the bottom quartile.
