Do Happy Employees Equal Happy Shareholders?
By Brendan Coffey Research has finally arrived to back up anecdotal evidence of the connection between well-cared-for employees and bottom-line profits. Despite an endless stream of examples linking the two, skeptics have always fallen back on the old defense that there is no hard-and-fast independent data to prove it. To some extent, theyve been right. When it comes to garnering funds for incentive programs and benefits for employees, the lack of data has been a real handicap. Recently, however, thats been changing, with the emergence of groups like the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement, founded by the Department of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. The primary mission of this not-for-profit research and education resource has been to amass a body of evidencepast, present and to comethat employee satisfaction and engagement drive an organizations bottom-line success. Joining the ranks of this nascent industry have been a number of ot
