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‘Feelings’ isn’t a word that you often hear in meetings or see printed on agendas. And sometimes, the significance of employees’ emotions and responses is overlooked entirely. This shouldn’t be the case.
Gallup quantified the link between employee feelings and corporate outcomes, reporting that lost productivity due to employee disengagement costs the US economy USD $450 billion to $550 billion per year in lost productivity. Why is the price tag so high? Because human emotions are real and they impact a wide range of material business metrics, from a company’s share price, to the value of its brand, through to its customer service rating.
A separate Gallup study by researcher James K. Harter and his colleagues found that business unit sales and profits at one point in time are predicted by employees’ feelings at earlier points in time. How people feel impacts their performance and if they’re healthy and happy they perform better.
When it comes to the design of workplace well-being, too many employers fail to step back and ask themselves this fundamental question: what are our employees thinking and feeling? The advent of wearables means much of the discourse surrounding workplace health and performance gets tangled with technology. This is critically important, but so is understanding that your employees are people, and empathy and understanding human behaviour is key to setting them on the path to health and happiness.
Ultimately, everything that an organisation is trying to achieve, from growth to customer centricity – and especially cultural transformation, as a 2017 McKinsey report on the topic confirmed – is dependent on the engagement and buy-in of employees.
Their feelings count, arguably more than anything else. So empower your employees with a positive attitude today.
For more, download our whitepaper on employee engagement