A recently published research report, State of Employee Engagement Activities, 2013, showing that only one-quarter of employees within large organisation are highly engaged.

This is a critical shortcoming because engaged employees are extremely valuable; they are more than twice as likely to do something good for the company that is unexpected of them, almost three times as likely to make a recommendation for an improvement, and six times as likely to recommend that a friend or relative apply for a job with their employer. Temkin Group surveyed 200 companies with 1,000 or more employees to understand what they are doing in the area of employee engagement.

As part of the survey, respondents completed Temkin Group's Employee Engagement Competency Assessment that evaluates five areas of activities: Inspire, Inform, Instruct, Involve, and Incent. Only five percent of organisations showed “strong” competencies while fifty-nine percent were “weak” or “very weak.” “Employee engagement is a highly underappreciated corporate asset that is worthy of much, much more attention,” states Bruce Temkin, Managing Partner of Temkin Group. The research also shows that companies with stronger employee engagement efforts deliver much better customer experience and have significantly higher financial results.

Other highlights from the research: Ninety-four percent of respondents measure employee engagement and two-thirds measure it at least annually; only 43 percent of respondents believe that their executive team highly prioritises taking action based on the employee engagement feedback; the top obstacles to improving employee engagement are a clear employee engagement strategy and inconsistent buy-in among middle managers; in 53 percent of companies with stronger employee engagement efforts, the CX group is active in the efforts compared with only 35 percent of other firms; firms with stronger employee engagement efforts are five times more likely than other firms to treat the results from employee engagement surveys as a high priority.