In advance of seminar season, I have been undertaking an unusually high level of report and survey reading. And today’s post is an amalgam of some of the findings from two such publications.

On the one hand we have a series of documents focusing on Employee Engagement provided by Dale Carnegie Training. On the other, we have UNUM’s “Communicating Employee Benefits” report.

Now there are lots of useful pieces of info in both sets of documents, and I may well return to both in later posts (and almost certainly in our seminars), but it did strike me that if you placed both documents into a Venn Diagram, there would be an overlap of sorts.

Let’s start with the Employee Engagement reports. Although these are based on US research rather than statistics from Blighty, I still expect that the findings travel well and are also representative of this country. From a survey of some 1,500 employees Dale Carengie found that 29% were fully engaged, and 26% disengaged. Leaving a huge number (45%) as only partially engaged.

As we have previously explored engagement matters. Engaged employees tend to produce more (and often better quality) work. Not only that, but they also cost their employer less in lower absence and recruitment/retention.

On this latter point, it’s worth mentioning that (according to these reports) in the US it’s been estimated that recruitment costs run at approximately 1.5 times the annual salary. Whilst this may at first glance appear an exaggeration, it’s probably not far off the mark when you factor in (for example) training, business interruption and client retention alongside the usual exit costs and recruitment processes.

So even if most businesses don’t yet have any effective way of measuring it, engagement does matter. So where does the UNUM report fit in this conversation?

UNUM found that 64% of employers who have invested in a large range of employee benefits are failing to communicate these to staff. The insurer went on to estimate that the cost to UK companies of this failure amounts to some £2.7bn (yes, that’s billion not million!) every year through staff turnover and sickness absence.

The report went on to claim:

“The attitudes displayed by staff who are unaware of the employee benefits on offer are no different from those in workplaces that do not offer these benefits.”

Or to put it another way, you may be wasting your money if you don’t communicate your benefits offering regularly and well. This is a well worn theme at Jelf seminars and workshops, but I still worry that UK business just does not give the communications exercise the time it needs to get the best out of their benefits packages for all concerned.

So it seems a logical squaring of the circle to conclude that one way of moving some of the 71% of the workforce to positive engagement territory would be to communicate the employee benefits package better. Even if only 5% of workers were more engaged as a result of a good communications exercise, this is still likely to have a major impact on the employer’s bottom line through increased productivity, lower absence, and (of course) lower recruitment costs.

So if you are one of the 64% of employer’s who are not communicating well, I would suggest that this area should perhaps be a high priority for 2014 and beyond.

Best regards

Steve