The UK loses upwards of £17bn per year on poor employee engagement.

Both the post’s headline and the statement above should attract your attention, and hopefully they are reinforced further by the latest research by LeapCR.

It’s always been a difficult sell into UK businesses that allowing employees to take paid leave add tangible value in subsequent productivity, but the evidence is mounting. Employee volunteering is one of the big cultural differences between the US and UK’s versions of Corporate Social Responsibility.

In my home country (UK) there has traditionally been far more inertia against management seeing the benefits in encouraging and brokering volunteering opportunities. To be fair it hasn’t just been the private sector, our voluntary sector also needs to up its game in promoting the benefits, but it is getting better thanks to reports such as this.

In the report out today it says: 

“At a time when a 1% rise in productivity of the UK services sector would deliver £17bn of further value to Britain’s annual GDP each year these findings support a new debate on the cost to Britain out of touch with its workers.”

                                                             

 Over 1000 UK full time employees were surveyed throughout March 2011 which also highlighted:

                                                  

  • 56% of Generation Y (aged 20 – 30) employees said that senior management was ‘out of touch’ with their age group.
  • 75% of employees wanted a better CSR balance for their companies
  • Only 58% even knew if their company had a CSR commitment

    

For further interpretation and opinion check out the articles below based on the research:

Allow staff time off for charity or ‘lose them’ - Daily Telegraph

How CSR can boost the UK economy by £17bn+ per year – MT magazine

For more about the people behind the research visit www.leapcr.com or follow on Twitter as @LeapCR

To see the whole report click on the .pdf icon here: 

Disclosure: LeapCR are clients of 3BL Media