Are your employees happy? A new research report by our friends at Universum, The Global Workforce Happiness Index, shows it’s time to take a data-driven approach to attracting and retaining top talent.
The company conducted the largest study to date of the most satisfied, loyal workers by country and by industry. More than 250,000 working professionals in 55 markets participated. The results deliver benchmarks for workplace happiness, analyse its impact on innovation and growth, and provide a way for companies to plan improvements.
The ability to retain experienced talent is no longer a matter of employee satisfaction alone; it is also tied to how employees compare to their peers in other organisations. This research has found that a negative gap between peers from one company to the next is often a signal that less satisfied employees are ripe for poaching. In fact, in 2018, 49 million more workers will leave their current employers than did in 2012 – a total turnover of 192 million workers worldwide.
The Global Workforce Happiness Index uses a scoring system that tracks three factors:
- Employee satisfaction
- An employee’s willingness to recommend a current employer
- An employee’s likelihood to switch jobs in the near future.
Companies can use the index to identify the specific drivers of employee satisfaction in their environments and the speed of addressing lapses between their performance and that of other companies. When in the negative and combined with the cost of recruiting and hiring, these factors can cost a company. So the index can provide a roadmap for improvement. Once achieved, positioning a company as an attractive place to work based on authentic data enables differentiation, more accurate candidate screens and reduced turnover.
At the core of the study is the Happiness Quadrant, which depicts challenges and opportunities by region across four basic categories of satisfaction. But the real value of this research is in the granular findings by country, equipping employers to diagnose problems at the local level and respond with targeted solutions.
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