The State Of Employee Engagement In 2016
Jacob Shriar — November 1, 2016 Follow @jacobshriar— November 1, 2016
This is the biggest thing we’ve ever done at Officevibe. Actually, this is one of the biggest things to ever happen in the HR industry.
Through Officevibe’s software, we collect tens of thousands of answers about employee engagement each week from customers in over 150 countries. The amount of information we have about the state of employee engagement across the world is incredibly rich and accurate.
We’re publishing that data starting today.
The most amazing part of it all is that this information updates in real-time as our customers continue to use our software.
There are two important reasons why this report is so powerful.
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It’s Always Up-To-Date
This is surprisingly important. Many times when you’re reading an HR article on Forbes or some similar publication, you’ll see a reference to a study about employee engagement that’s a few years old (it’s usually Gallup’s state of the American workplace from 2013).
While that’s an incredible report, it’s now a few years old. Our report, on the other hand, is up to date right now and will be up to date in a year from now.
If you’re ever referencing a study/survey/report for an article that you’re writing, our state of employee engagement is a great source to use.
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It’s More Statistically Relevant Than Most Reports
Our report contains answers from 50,000+ people
One of the biggest problems I have with a lot of the “studies” or “surveys” that get written about in big publications is that they’re from a survey that only asked 500 people, or 800, or I’ve even seen one with 350. There’s 350,000,000 people in North America. I’m not sure how we can trust the validity of a survey done with 350 people.
I’m not saying that ours is perfect, but I’m confident to say it’s more valid because of the number of users and data points we’re collecting.
From a purely statistical/mathematical point of view, it makes sense to trust our report more than most of what you’re reading out there.
We found some really, really surprising and interesting data for each one of the metrics that we measure.
Before we dive into some of the key findings of the report, let’s get two important items out of the way.
- Anonymity
- The methodology
Does This Affect Anonymity?
Absolutely not. Let me explain very clearly how we did this, to avoid any concerns from anyone. There is no impact on anonymity at all.
All of the data is aggregated together, meaning no one single data point or person was ever identified during the creation of this report.
This is actually the same thing I explain to customers about how their employees’ data works.
Everything is aggregated anonymously.
The Methodology
The State of Employee Engagement report was created using answers from approximately 50,000 users of the Officevibe software from 2013 to today (and it’s still going). As of today, that’s a bit more than 1,200,000 data points.
All of the questions come from Officevibe’s library of questions in our survey software, though not all of the questions in our library were used in the creation of this report.
Each week, users answer 5 questions via email or Slack chosen at random from Officevibe’s library of questions.
Officevibe continues to collect answers each week and updates the report in real-time, as new answers are collected.
No personal information was collected (besides an encrypted user ID) and there was no incentive offered for participating in this report.
Key Highlights As Of Today
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s look at some of the key highlights. It’s important to keep in mind that since the report is updated in real-time, this data might change a bit, but I don’t see it drastically changing.
Having said that, as of today, here are some interesting findings:
Employees Planning To Leave Soon
Probably the most shocking finding, in my opinion, was that 15% of employees don’t see themselves working at their company a year from now.
Think about how crazy that is for a second.
Turnover is incredibly expensive, both financially and emotionally, and to think that there are that many people that are planning to leave their organizations soon is scary.
Similarly, 20% of employees are worried that they might lose their job in the next 3-6 months. These two might be related, but managers definitely need to do something to lower stress levels of employees.
This is an issue that’s relatively easy to fix, the key is to constantly remove the fear from employees.
Feedback Needs To Be Improved
One of the biggest areas where we saw improvement was needed was with employee feedback.
We see that managers aren’t giving enough feedback, and even when they do give feedback, the quality of it isn’t that great.
Consider these statistics from our research:
- 1 out of 3 employees have to wait more than 3 MONTHS to get feedback from their manager
- 60% of employees think the quality of the feedback they receive should be improved
But interestingly, we see that employees are craving more feedback. Specifically, we find that:
- 96% of employees think receiving feedback regularly is a good thing
- 62% of employees wish they received more feedback from their colleagues
This shows that it doesn’t always have to be the manager who gives feedback. A good idea for you is to create a way for people to collaborate and work with each other, while encouraging a culture of open and honest feedback.
Managers Need To Communicate Better
One of the biggest issues is that we see managers aren’t doing a good enough job communicating with their employees.
As a manager, you want to avoid as much confusion and remove as many barriers for your employees as possible, and frequent communication is the way to do this.
What we find in our research is that:
- 34% of employees wish their manager communicated more frequently with them
- 1 out of 5 employee think their manager isn’t really transparent with them
Bottom line: Employees are overworked, underpaid, and underutilized.
Overall, there is still a lot of work to do to make sure employees are engaged at work. Looking at these next statistics shows us just how bad the situation is:
- 26% of employees leave work feeling drained or very drained every single day
- 85% of employees feel that their talents aren’t fully utilized
- 64% of employees aren’t satisfied with their current salary and benefits package
See The Full Report For More
This is only a small part of what the full report contains. Check it out to see everything there is to know about the current state of employee engagement across the world.
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