What does it take for an organisation to truly harness the power of its employees to improve productivity and business performance? Increasingly, business leaders are realising that the answer lies in creating a positive work environment in which employees feel they can achieve their individual, and collective, full potential. It’s a powerful force: One Gallup analysis of 50,000 companies showed that high-engagement organisations have more than 20% higher profitability and productivity levels than their low-engagement counterparts.
While the concept of building an engaged workforce is straightforward, achieving it is no easy task. This challenge is only intensifying as technology advances and businesses globalise. As a result, leaders face an urgent need to expand their leadership repertoire in order to motivate an increasingly diverse labour force. But for a significant percentage of the workforce, Australian organisations have not yet been able to uniformly create such environments. Despite the fact that women comprise almost 60% of university graduates and 46% of the workforce, only 10% of senior leaders and 4% of CEOs in Australian ASX200 companies are women. Further, our research shows that about 60% of women don’t feel they have equal opportunity to be promoted into senior roles at the same rate as their male colleagues.