Nickel in demand

operations
Engaged employees stay with
companies for a long time. They
are part of the company team,
company culture, and company value.
Creating company engagement drives
employee retention. Retaining great
employees keeps hiring and training
costs low. Retaining employees can only
be achieved with consistent and effective
employee communication.
This is not a tautology. Each element
will be examined independently,
yet engagement, retention, and
communication are not mutually exclusive.
All three conditions are required to produce
the best working environment, the best
relationships between management, labor,
vendors, suppliers, and customers.
“To win in the marketplace
you must first win in the
workplace”
This article will expressly consider
how employee engagement, retention,
and communication are most profoundly
impacting the manufacturing and
industrial sectors today.
Former Campbell’s Soup CEO,
Doug Conant, once said, “To win in the
marketplace you must first win in the
workplace.”
Kevin Kruse, a contributor to Forbes
magazine, concluded that engaged
employees leads to higher service, quality,
and productivity, which leads to…higher
customer satisfaction, which leads to…
increased sales (repeat business and
referrals), which leads to…higher levels of
profit, which leads to… higher shareholder
returns.
Workforce magazine cited a manager
of organizational effectiveness and
employee engagement at a Fortune
100 company who suggested, “The
typical organization today views talent
management as three building blocks:
attract, develop, and retain. These are
solid building blocks. The challenge is
that these blocks won’t stick together
unless there is mortar. And that mortar is
employee engagement. A robust, worldclass
talent management process has to
put the mortar between those three key
building blocks.”
Quantitative research reinforces the
relationship among customers, employees,
and the bottom line. The two-decade
classic 1994 Harvard Business Review
article, “Putting the Service Profit Chain
to Work” established relationships among
profitability, customer loyalty, employee
satisfaction, and productivity. The decade
old article from Journal of Applied
Psychology, “Which Comes First: Employee
Attitudes or Organizational Financial and
Market Performance?” found consistent
and significant positive relationships over
time between overall job satisfaction and
financial and market performance (as well
as reciprocal relationships).
These data, while still applicable are
pre-technology when most plant floor
workers are inundated with text messages,
emails, and have been conditioned to
145 character tweets. How information
is translated to create employee
engagement on the manufacturing
workforce has changed and continues to
change at a very rapid pace.
Gallup Consulting proved the critical
role of employee engagement (when
the Q12 Meta-Analysis hypothesis was
tested). The theory was postulated
and confirmed that business-unitlevel
employee engagement has
positive average correlations with the
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[ Aug 2014 ] BE Monthly