Engagement and the global workplace survey

Employee engagement is a serious bottom-line issue. It fuels organisations during times of economic growth and, more critically, when market conditions are uncertain and volatile.

When workers become disengaged, it costs companies money, slows projects, drains resources, and undermines company goals as well as the efforts of their engaged counterparts. This is why employee engagement is one of the key issues facing leading global organisations today.

Organisations might be able to absorb the effects of a handful of disengaged workers, but many business leaders don’t realise how significant the problem is.  A recent report from Steelcase has found that more than one-third of workers in 17 of the world’s most important economies are disengaged and another third are somewhere in the middle, not working against their companies but not driving better business results either.

Like other complex problems facing business leaders today, employee engagement has many variables that are difficult to address and slow to change.

employee engagement

Building on decades of primary research about work and the workplace, Steelcase partnered with global research firm Ipsos to understand how the places where people work impact employee engagement.

We posed these questions:

  • Can the office be used as a strategic lever to impact engagement?
  • What kinds of changes to the work environment will make the biggest impact?

After studying 12,480 office workers in 17 countries for two years, we uncovered a correlation between employee attitudes about their workplace and their engagement levels. The Steelcase Global Report is the first ever study that links employee engagement with workplace satisfaction and provides quantitative data that supports the role the workplace can play in addressing this key bottom-line issue.

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Attract and retain through workplace design