Employee engagement is one of those perpetual trending topics in HR and recruiting, probably because for years now, pundits and practitioners alike still haven’t figured out how to confront what seems to be a fairly endemic case of malaise and apathy perpetually plaguing our workforce.
I’m not sure why it is that talent leaders and recruiting pros can’t to have a near obsessive fixation on what’s inherently an amorphous and highly ambiguous concept, but I think the primary driver of our engagement fetish is that it seems to be a convenient, categorical catch-all that’s more or less seen as the whipping boy for all of the manifold problems plaguing the HR and recruiting profession today.
Inherently, we know that an engaged workforce is more satisfied in their jobs and tend to be happier, more productive and stick around for longer tenures and lower pay, a pretty compelling business case for justifying the significant chunk of change we spend on employee engagement initiatives – Bersin by Deloitte estimates employers spend approximately $720 million on employee engagement improvement annually.
While this represents a staggering sum, what’s already a bull market looks likely to continue its boom for the indefinite future, considering that as ubiquitous as employee engagement has become, only about 50% of employers report actively investing in related programs, products or initiatives last year, meaning that only 50% of the overall market for employee engagement solutions has even been tapped.
Read the whole post over at Matt Charney’s Snark Attack (an FOT contributor blog).
Matt Charney is the Executive Editor for Recruiting Daily, whose flagship property, RecruitingBlogs, is the world’s largest social network and content sharing platform for recruiting and HR professionals. Matt oversees editorial strategy and content marketing for RecruitingDaily’s portfolio of online properties. Prior to joining RecruitingBlogs, Matt served in marketing leadership roles at leading HR technology companies like Talemetry, CornerstoneOnDemand & Monster. Matt began his career as a corporate recruiter for such companies as Walt Disney and Warner Bros.
Matt has been named as one of the top 25 influencers in recruiting by publications like the Huffington Post, Glassdoor, CareerBuilder and LinkedIn, and has been recognized as one of the 2015 HR Game Changers by HR Magazine adn SHRM, the 2015 HRO Superstar for Analyst Excellence and the 2014 Top Recruiting Blogger by Social Talent. His blog mattcharney.com was also named one of the top 15 business blogs to follow by WordPress in 2014. Matt serves as a member of the advisory boards for the Candidate Experience Awards, Rolepoint, RecruitiFi, Take the Interview, HiringSolved, Universum and Textio.
Follow him @MattCharney or connect with him on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/mattcharney).