Financial Advisors' Daily Digest: Engagement Could Produce Boon "As Big As Internet"

Gil Weinreich, Senior Editor at Seeking Alpha, a leading portal for financial advisors, believes engagement could be bigger than the Internet.

 

“To a bull market that is old, to an economy that grows slowly, to stock investors who want higher future returns, ‘engagement’ may be the next frontier,” writes Gil Weinreich in a recent article entitled “We Need a Price-to-Employee-Engagement Ratio.” Weinreich, who has been reporting for financial advisors for 20 years, currently as Senior Editor for Seeking Alpha, asks: “Does corporate reporting yet capture the true underlying strength of an organization – that is, its human capital?”

 

Weinreich writes that his epiphany resulted from a “conversation I had with that friend about a year or so ago [that] was fairly brief, because I did not grasp its importance at the time. But I can now see why his corporation and Gallup are devoting attention to this issue. The more engaged an employee is, the more productive he is; the more productive employees are, the more profitable is the company; the more profitable the company, the higher stock prices climb, and so forth. Most readers know about price-to-earnings ratios. Do we yet have a price-to-engagement ratio?” 

 

He continues: “I’m sure there are numerous factors that go into properly engaging employees, but the most obvious one to a non-specialist like me is showing appreciation for workers’ contributions, by which I mean appreciation beyond their paycheck. Yes, I understand that there is a quid-pro-quo aspect to employment, kind of like the old Soviet-era joke: ‘They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.’ But human nature is that we all take the ordinary arrangement for granted. We shouldn’t, but most people do. And indeed, a 2014 survey from the American Psychological Association reflects this idea.” He notes that the survey found that those “those who felt valued by their employer were more likely to report being satisfied with their job (92% felt valued versus 29% of those who did not) and to say they are motivated to do their best (91% vs. 37%) and to recommend their employer to others (85% vs. 15%).

 

He concludes: “If we could close the engagement gap at work, we’d experience a boom bigger than the Internet. I don’t see a big push in this direction, but the little pushes hinted at by my friend and Gallup leaves room to hope.”