Over the past twelve months, employee engagement has dropped significantly across the U.S. workforce. In March 2010, Modern Survey released the results of a comprehensive study depicting a precipitous decline in the degree to which U.S. workers are psychologically invested in their work. Now, nearly six months later, a new study focused specifically on the financial services industry shows the same trend of declining engagement, only magnified to a startling degree.
While employee engagement had trended upward in the U.S. financial services sector from 2008 to 2009, over the past year, the industry has experienced a tremendous decline. Most alarmingly, the number of disengaged employees has skyrocketed from 11% of the population in 2009 to 29% in 2010, a statistically significant increase of eighteen percentage points.
Modern Survey’s Employee Engagement Index uses five questions that gauge the extent to which employees: take pride in their company, believe they have a promising future at their company, recommend their company as a great place to work, go “above and beyond” their normal job duties to help their company succeed, and intend to stay with their company. All five of these items saw steep declines from 2009 to 2010, including twenty-plus percentage point drops in the degree to which employees take pride in their organization, and the degree to which they are willing to put forth extra effort on the job.
Modern Survey President, Don MacPherson, explains, “The pattern we are seeing in the financial services industry is in line with the pattern we have seen for the overall U.S. workforce. But within financial services the declines in engagement are much more dramatic. Worker disengagement is even worse for the largest financial services companies. At companies with over 10,000 employees, two out of every five employees are disengaged. That compares to one in five for the overall U.S. workforce.
“Another disturbing trend we found is that employee “intent to stay” continues to drop. In 2009 it dropped to 62% favorable from 65% favorable the year before. This year it dropped to 55% favorable. Traditionally, the financial services industry has scored well above the U.S. workforce in this category. Now the percentage of financial services workers who intend to stay with their company is slightly below the U.S. workforce. This is an important warning for executives because if employees leave their organizations there will be an incredible amount of damage control necessary to offset the knowledge and relationships that go with the exiting employees.”
While there is no doubt that the latest findings present a troubling outlook for the financial services industry, Modern Survey Senior Consultant, Bruce Campbell, sees opportunity for organizations to overcome this trend of declining engagement and ultimately position themselves to succeed.
“Our findings indicate that financial services organizations are vulnerable to potentially devastating loss of talent in the coming months,” says Campbell. “Given this, leaders and managers at all levels need to be paying more attention than ever to their employees — particularly their top performers and high potentials. Now is the time for a “high touch” approach to managing people. Invest extra time and effort in getting to better know and understand each employee as an individual — what their interests are, what they value most, their current concerns as well as their hopes for the future. Spending time on personal conversations like this tangibly demonstrates that you care about and value employees as individuals and this is something all employees want to feel and believe, perhaps now more than ever. Make notes about things you learn that can help you tailor the things you do to recognize and reward individual employees so that they have the greatest impact. And to minimize loss of key talent, perhaps the most important thing you can do is to create and communicate compelling, personalized visions of the opportunities for growth and advancement that are likely to become available to them if they continue to perform at their best.”
See the full results of this study at: http://modernsurvey.com/news/
About Modern Survey
Modern Survey has established itself as a leader in the online survey industry, providing a robust suite of proprietary technologies combined with an array of consultative services that help our clients manage talent throughout the employee life cycle, measure and evaluate customer satisfaction and gain insight into changing markets. Modern Survey products and services have spanned 100 countries on six continents in over 30 languages. Through direct and partner channels, Modern Survey’s tools and services have reached more than 500 companies, over 85 of which are among the Fortune 500.
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