It’s no surprise that employee engagement levels have dropped dramatically over the last year. What is alarming is that while engagement has dropped 9% amongst workers overall, top performing employees have expressed a 25% drop in engagement. It’s time to wake up and take action! After all, companies can’t be successful without these top performers.


The startling facts about top performers
According to the most recent Watson Wyatt and WorldatWork survey, the cost-cutting actions employers have been making to deal with the economic crisis have caused a sharp decline in the morale and commitment of their workers, especially top performers. Here are some of the facts:

* The number of top performing employees who would recommend others take jobs at their company has declined by nearly 20%.
* Compared with last year, top-performing employees are 26 % less likely to be satisfied with advancement opportunities at their company.
* 14% of them are less likely to want to remain with their company versus take a job elsewhere.

Take action
What to do? There are things you can do as an employer to increase morale amongst not only your top employers, but the organization as a whole. Lin Grensing-Pophal, a reporter with the Human Resource Executive, posted a story today on top performer retention and we wanted to share and comment on the article.

Lin writes that creating motivated and engaged employees is not all about money. According to Roxanne Emmerich, author of the recently released book, "Thank God It’s Monday! How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love", creating a engaged workforce is about making employees feel valued for their contributions and successes.


Her advice to HR leaders is to measure progress and celebrate success, a concept she calls ‘measure and celebrate’. We also strongly believe in the ‘measure and celebrate’ concept, and highly recommend that it be done at both an individual and company level. For example, recognizing and celebrating an employee milestone such as attaining excellent customer service scores, and recognizing a celebrating a company win, such as securing a major client account.

Roxanne believes that HR is in a position to “dramatically transform the results of an organization — it’s really their job to make those things happen.” But, to do this, she says, they “need to get up to the 30,000-foot level and give people a vision of something extraordinary to go after.”

We couldn’t agree more and look forward to sharing more best practices!