New Temkin Group Research Shows Slight Drop in Employee Engagement in the U.S.

WABAN, Mass., March 11, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Temkin Group, a leading market research and consulting firm that helps organizations improve their customer experience, released a new research report: "Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2014." The report analyzes the level of engagement that more than 5,000 full-time U.S. employees have with their employers and compares these results to similar Temkin Group studies from the previous two years.

The study, which is based on a survey of employees completed in August 2013, shows that 55% of U.S. employees are moderately or highly engaged, a slight decrease from 57% that Temkin Group found last year. Temkin Group found the largest decline in engagement with the youngest group of employees in the study, those between 18 and 24 years old.

The study finds that engaged employees are extremely valuable. When compared with disengaged employees, highly engaged employees are more than three times as likely to do something good for their employer even if it's not expected of them, almost three times as likely to make a recommendation about an improvement at work, more than 2.5 times as likely to stay late at work if something needs to be done, and more than two times as likely to help someone else at work.

"Engaged employees are incredibly valuable assets," states Aimee Lucas, Customer Experience Transformist & Vice President of Temkin Group. "It's not a coincidence that high performing companies have considerably more engaged employees than their peers."

The research shows that 73% of employees in companies that have significantly better financial performance than their peers are highly or moderately engaged, compared with only 46% of employees in companies with financial performance that lags their competitors.

Some of the other findings from the research include:

• About 60% of employees in companies with 100 employees or less are moderately or highly engaged compared with only 49% of employees at companies with more than 10,000 employees.
• We examined employee engagement across 14 industries. At the high-end, 72% of employees in the real estate, rental and leasing industry are moderately or highly engaged. At the bottom of the list, 44% of employees in public administration are moderately or highly engaged.
• Fifty-nine percent of employees that always interact with customers are at least moderately engaged while only 42% of employees that never interact with customers are equally engaged.
• Nearly 80% of executives are at least moderately engaged, compared with only 46% of individual contributors.
• Across all age groups except for those older than 64, males are equally or more engaged than females. The largest gender gap is with 25- to 34-year-olds.

To gauge employee engagement, the research uses the Temkin Employee Engagement Index, which is a three-question assessment completed by survey respondents.

The report "Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2014" can be downloaded for free from the Customer Experience Matters blog, at ExperienceMatters.wordpress.com as well as from the Temkin Group website, www.TemkinGroup.com.

About Temkin Group: Temkin Group is widely recognized as a leading customer experience research and consulting firm. Many of the world's largest brands rely on its insights and advice to steer their transformational journeys. Temkin Group combines customer experience thought leadership with a deep understanding of the dynamics of organizations to help accelerate results. Rather than layering on cosmetic changes, Temkin Group helps companies embed practices within their culture by building four critical competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Employee Engagement, Compelling Brand Values, and Customer Connectedness. The firm's ongoing research identifies leading and emerging best practices across a wide range of activities for engaging the hearts and minds of customers, employees, and partners. For more information, contact Bruce Temkin at 617-916-2075 or send an email.

About Aimee Lucas: Aimee Lucas is a Customer Experience Transformist & Vice President at Temkin Group. She has over 16 years of experience improving service delivery and transforming the customer experience through people development and process improvement initiatives.

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SOURCE Temkin Group