Based on 15 years of research, consulting and leading, RESPECT™ by Dr. Paul Marciano addresses the most fundamental challenge of every organization – increasing the ROI of their employees. Extensive research by renowned organizations, including Gallup, the Hay Group and Corporate Leadership Council, have consistently identified employee engagement (EE) as the critical determinant of return on human capital investment. Level of EE has been associated with productivity, profitability, turnover, customer loyalty, quality defects, and employee physical and psychological well-being. Without question, EE is the single most important and robust determinant of corporate vitality.

Employee engagement refers to employees’ psychological, emotional and behavioral commitment to further their organization’s mission, vision and goals. Actively engaged employees consistently exert high levels of discretionary effort and outperform disengaged employees across numerous dimensions, e.g., productivity, attention to detail, teamwork and initiative. Compared to engaged employees, disengaged employees not only do less work and work less productively, they cost their company money through twice as many missed days and dramatically higher rates of turnover. Furthermore, since disengaged employees are also most likely to be the poorest performing employees, they requiring more resources in terms of time and attention from their supervisor and human resources.

In general, corporate leaders and human resource professionals have sought to increase employee productivity by motivating their workforce with reward and recognition programs. The vast majority of these programs have been ineffective in promoting sustained levels of employee productivity because motivating employees and engaging employees require very different approaches. Traditional reward and recognition programs lack “staying power” because, like diets, they are narrowly focused on clearly identified goals as opposed to changing habits and core underlying beliefs. Instead of “losing weight,” the preference would be to “live a healthy lifestyle.” Business leaders who wish to foster corporate vitality must focus on engaging – not motivating – their workforce.

RESPECT™ posits that EE is fundamentally driven by employees’ experience of respect. Specifically, EE depends on the extent to which employees respect their organization, supervisor, team members, work, and feel respected. For example, employees who do not feel respected by their supervisor or the organization will seldom utilize discretionary effort. Unconsciously, all employees are continually assessing these aspects of respect and modifying their level of discretionary effort. Critically, RESPECT™ identifies the factors that drive employee’s assessment of respect. These drivers include: Recognition, Empowerment, Supportive Feedback, Partnering, Expectations, Consideration and Trust.

RESPECT™ is a model and accompanying set of tools that provide a company-wide assessment of a) Employee Respect, b) Level of Engagement and c) the 7 Drivers (corporate and/or individual leader) of respect and engagement. In addition to identifying the human capital opportunity cost of engagement, the report priorities the “biggest bang for the buck” opportunity.