Celebrating engagement

An engaged workforce is clearly preferable to one that is disengaged – but how many companies measure the financial impact of their staff’s engagement? Last year, Serco began to research the links between employee engagement and performance. Financial data about each sector was matched with the findings of Serco’s annual staff survey. We found that contracts with high levels of engagement (65 per cent and above) have much stronger operating profits than those with low engagement levels.

Similar results were also found when looking at customer advocacy. According to data from our customer insight surveys (which we reviewed across more than 130 contracts), our businesses with high-performing staff engagement are 33 per cent more likely to see our customers promote us.

Of course, cynics will suggest that it’s a chicken and egg situation: if you have happy customers, you’ll have engaged employees. So this year, we deepened our analysis. Our initial findings suggest that engagement appears to precede customer advocacy – if engagement goes up one year, advocacy follows the next. We are currently working on a new set of key performance indicators, which will include employee engagement, to ensure that it becomes part of how we measure performance...

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Ethosis aimed at public sector leaders, politicians, academics and policy specialists debating the future of public services today.