Mercer report says 40% of employees are looking elsewhere, but SMEs well-placed to boost productivity

Making employees engaged with an organisation rather than just satisfied might be as simple as ensuring an employee can see their future within the organisation, Mercer says, adding that SMEs are well-placed to reap the productivity benefits of an engaged workforce.

Speaking as a Mercer employee survey shows that four out of 10 employees in Australia are seriously considering leaving their job, Rob Bebbington, market leader for human capital Australia and New Zealand at Mercer, says it needn’t cost businesses much to improve how their employees feel about their organisation and their role within it.

“Satisfaction is an output of an engagement level. The big-ticket items that drive engagement are being respected, quality leadership and communication, feeling a part of the business, making a contribution, and agreeing with the value-set the organisation is pursuing,” Bebbington says.

Bebbignton says SMEs are in a stronger position to drive employee engagement, and therefore productivity, with international studies showing an employee engaged with their organisation is happier and more productive.

“Many larger corporates know they need to drive better engagement and have issues around leadership, but there’s a shopping list mentality to it, in that, ‘Yes we need to have good systems but if we can tick the box saying we have a strategy, the box is ticked’,” Bebbington says.

“Anecdotally, consultants often find there are more innovative practices in SMEs for the simple reason you see the outcome of the effort more quickly and can then fine-tune it.”

And with executive pay, a hot issue in Australia, Bebbington has one suggestion for deciding executive pay levels: using employee engagement as metric.

“Should we be assessing leaders around levels of employee engagement? I’d suggest we should,” Bebbington says. (One wonders how Qantas CEO Alan Joyce would fare right now.)

Mercer’s Inside Employees’ Minds report, a survey of more than 1,000 employees conducted in early 2011, found that one-fifth did not commit to staying or leaving, and women were less satisfied than men, particularly about opportunities to develop their career and communication, although more men (42%) than women (37%) were considering leaving their organisation.

Fifty-two percent of employees aged 25-34 also said they were considering leaving their organisation, despite reporting the highest level of satisfaction with their organisation (72%), the report found.