Research Supports the Benefit of Employee Engagement

April 18, 2016

When the Coca‑Cola Retailing Research Council North America NACS began to look into building a culture of employee engagement, it was hard to know what was real and what wasn’t. That’s when they asked Dr. Blake Frank, a professor at the University of Dallas, to dig into academic papers on the topic.

Academic papers have the advantage of being peer reviewed; i.e. critiqued by other academics, to ensure that they are well done, make a contribution to learning and are supported with original research and footnotes to earlier sources.

The council asked that he review what had been written on employee engagement across industries and develop a broad-based understanding of how employee engagement helps to improve business strategies. It is not important that the findings come just from convenience retailing; that connection will be established later through a large scale industry study in the third part of this project. These findings can benefit all forms of business growth.

From this work, Professor Frank produced a paper (available on the website) that serves as a reference report. It’s designed for HR professionals in convenience and other types of retailing, as well as academics and consultants who have a deep interest in what makes employee engagement so important in all types of growth strategies for business.