The Relationship Between Employee Engagement And Customer Engagement, Performance And Profitability

Written by Adelina Chelniciuc on November 22, 2012. Posted in Individual Performance, News

The first presentation on the third day of the HR Summit and Expo 2012 was delivered by Tanith Dodge, HR Director at Marks and Spencer UK. Her presentation was focused on employee engagement and business performance.

Some of the key points of this presentation were:

In a survey conducted in UK, one in ten executives said that employee engagement is critical but very few discussed it in board meetings;
Examples of barriers to engagement include: leadership capabilities, the leader, culture and economic systems, organizational hierarchy; an example of addressing barriers to engagement at Marks and Spencer is sharing financial data at levels in the organization;
Employee engagement can be pursued in either a transactional mode or transformational mode; Tanith quoted a CIPD (The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) study according to which 75 percent of companies operate in the transactional mode, focusing on conducting employee engagement surveys; she also emphasized the importance of having a clear vision and a narrative around the past, present and future of the company;
Marks and Spencer used to employ annual engagement surveys but they now rely on more frequent pulse survey; the survey is structured into questions around employee perceptions of their company, their manager and their role; in addition, employees have the opportunity to take well-being surveys as well;
The company also relies on mystery shopping and customer insights and looks at correlations between these and employee engagement results.