Engaged employees ‘good for business’

Companies now have tools available to them to measure how engaged their workforce is, one firm has suggested.

According to research conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, once businesses have established how happy their workforce is, they can make improvements and boost performance.

Entitled Managing People in a Changing World, the report examines how organisations can plot the level of engagement for their entire staff by looking at information relating to such things as absence rates, employee attitudes, training hours per full-time employee and resignation levels.

"Companies are now able to ascertain how they are performing in previously uncharted areas, such as succession planning, innovation and talent management as well as using the ‘harder’ metrics, such as return on investment per worker, to determine overall business performance," stated Richard Phelps, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

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Meanwhile, according to the 2008 edition of the Ashridge Management Index, the motivational approaches adopted by organisations are failing to have a constructive effect on managers and their colleagues, with 55 per cent of bosses questioned critical of the strategies adopted.