Thumbs down: British companies not highly rated by workers

It’s probably the data geek in me but I’m always interested in performance rankings and especially when they’re international . I recently saw an article in my LinkedIn feed about forbes world-best-employers. This survey is a new one (it’s only been going since 2017) but large scale so I was keen to see how the UK stacked up versus other countries. Evidently not so well.

The data is based on responses from 430,000 workers around the world who were asked to rate their employer and the likelihood that they would recommend the company to a friend or family member. Of course US organisations dominate the list (it’s a Forbes survey after all) but there are also sizeable representations from China, Germany, India and Japan. It wasn’t just companies from large countries that made it into the ranking. Organisations from 42 nations featured in the list. From Thailand to Colombia there are clearly plenty of businesses whose workers are happy and engaged in their jobs. Surprisingly (at least for me) there wasn’t a single UK company featured in the top 150. If you looked at a ranking of companies by, say, market capitalization or revenue the UK would probably have at least 10 in the top 150. Surely companies like BP, Prudential, HSBC and Tesco must be good places to work? Can ConocoPhilips (Oil and Gas, US), Principal Financial Group (Life and Health Insurance, US), Kasikorn Bank (Thailand) and Costco (Retail, US) be delivering an employee experience so much better than their British counterparts? Where were the Vodafones and BBCs of this world? It was good to see IHG and Marks and Spencer leading the UK contingent but only IHG ranked in the top 200. 

To be fair, a large number of organizations on the list are US technology companies that may, arguably, be more in tune with the cultures and working environments beloved of employees but Daimler, BMW, Nestle and Hilton all appear in the top 30 and these are not your classic tech businesses.

It’s not just this survey that emphasises the UK 'deficit'. Other data tell a similar story. Of the 2017 LinkedIn Where the World wants to work survey there are no British companies in the top 50. Glassdoor has Google, Facebook, Salesforce and Apple in its 2018 UK top 10 employers.  Do US (and apparently other countries’) companies understand more about generating employee happiness and engagement than we do?

The link between engagement and productivity

Moving up the ranking on staff engagement surveys should not necessarily be a focus for businesses but addressing low productivity, a known consequence of weak employee engagement, should be. The ONS Economic Ouput Estimates 2016 puts UK GDP per worker behind all other G7 countries with the exception of Japan. This summer an article in the FT suggested that our productivity continues to flatline. Are our economic woes partly (or wholly?) the consequence of a general lack of UK worker engagement and commitment?

There is definitely evidence that suggests engagement and productivity are connected. The 2017 Gallup State of the Global Workplacereport has the UK languishing behind most of northern Europe in terms of engagement and with one of the highest actively disengaged workforces (i.e. people undermining their employers) in the region. We should be asking ourselves why so many employees in British firms are unhappy at work.

Free beer and ‘cool’ office spaces isn't enough

Many companies see employee engagement as something you achieve if you offer enough dress down days, social events, bean bags and free beer. “If we do plenty of those things the problem will go away, right?” Wrong! These are the superficial 'band-aid" responses. On their own they won’t work (or at least not for long) and are not the solution. We know that employees respond well to learning opportunity, flexible working, believing that their jobs and contributions matter and make a difference, feeling that the organization cares about them and to being exposed to great role models. Fostering the emotional connection with your employees requires leadership and authentic regard for the individual. The good news is that the interventions that create true employee engagement are relatively simple to implement and the investment is more than offset by the productivity gains from truly engaging your employees.