ACCORDING TO THE BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, in October 2019 the US unemployment rate was 3.6 percent—the lowest reported since 1969. It is a job-seeker’s market and the situation is pushing employers to rethink what it takes to attract and retain talented, enthusiastic team members. Companies that have achieved recognition as “employers of choice” differentiate themselves by recognizing the important distinction between the historical workplace standard of “employee satisfaction” and the newer concept of “employee engagement” which was introduced in 1990 by Boston University Professor William Kahn.
In general terms, job satisfaction is the extent to which an employee likes or dislikes his or her job. In contrast, analytics firm Gallup describes “engaged” employees as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace. Engaged employees are not just happy or satisfied. They are actively involved in advancing their employer’s organizational goals.
In the club industry, where employees are integral to the member experience and the organizational culture that defines the club, that difference is especially critical and the impact of employee engagement has been verified by Club Benchmarking member-focused research. Since our member research began, more than 20,000 club members have participating in our studies and “club staff” has consistently been cited as a major factor that influenced their motivation to join a club as well as their ongoing attachment and loyalty to the club they chose.
In light of those findings, it is clear that the ability to accurately measure and manage employee engagement would be advantageous for clubs. Because existing research from Gallup and other groups did not adequately address the unique considerations of a private club environment, Club Benchmarking took on the challenge of studying employee engagement in the club industry in 2017. Our objective was to develop a process that would produce the actionable insight clubs needed to compete in a challenging hiring market and to improve their ability to support the individuals directly responsible for delivering the member experience.
Working with general managers, club HR professionals and other experts, we optimized our process and approach to ensure delivery of accurate industry benchmarks and statistically reliable insights. To date, CB employee engagement research has captured data from nearly 5,000 club employees with roughly 10,000 qualitative comments providing additional context for our analysis. The combination of hard data and anecdotal input is used to develop an action plan and to serve as a baseline for monitoring the health of the club’s workplace culture.
RESEARCH FINDINGS: EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a metric used to monitor employee engagement and loyalty by measuring how likely a team member is to recommend their employer as a great place to work. Generally speaking, an eNPS of 10–30 is considered good and a score of 50 is excellent. Based more than 10,000 club employee responses, average eNPS in the club industry is 23.94 for management staff and 11.98 for non-management.
Training has a positive impact on employee engagement, but those efforts seem to be concentrated on new hires. Our research shows the number of employees that say they get the training they need to be successful begins to drop off after the first six months.
An employee’s supervisor plays a major role in engagement. Among non-management staff, 76 percent feel their supervisor has realistic expectations for their team and 77% feel their supervisor is approachable & easy to talk to.
The majority of management and non-management employees (79 percent) feel they are treated well by the members. Regarding the relationship between board and management, 70 percent of managers feel the board sets policy and allows management to run the day-to-day operations of the club.
Mike Morin is member success manager at Club Benchmarking. If you have questions or would like to learn more about employee engagement analysis, he can be reached at [email protected].