Real Estate and Employee Engagement

The fresh-off-the-press 2011 Workplace Trends Report from Quantum Workplace is getting a lot of buzz from bloggers (http://tiny.cc/70801) and business leaders alike. After collecting and analyzing over a million employee engagement surveys from the Best Places to Work program, some of the shifts happening in the workplace are pretty startling. What is NOT startling is how closely engagement of the U.S. workforce is tied to movement in the stock market. That’s been known for years by some of the world’s most famous workplace researchers, including Quantum Workplace. For those who have been hiding under a rock and are unaware of this relationship, see exhibit A (note: proving the cause-and-effect of this relationship, that one necessarily causes the other, is still up for debate):

What IS startling comes from the rank-order of the most engaged industries within this report. Topping the list – Real Estate – with an engagement score of 86.7. That’s 11% higher than Technology (8th on the list). Commercial construction and the housing market are still enduring a lot of uncertainty, but it’s obvious from the data that inside the walls of hundreds of REIT’s and other real estate companies, leaders believe future success is coming and they are communicating a vision and plan to make that happen. Naturally, more real estate employees are enjoying their work and feel their jobs align with career goals now more than ever.

If Exhibit A holds any water then we should see not just above-average returns in the stock market for real estate companies (the DOW recently nudged past 12,000 for the first time since 2008 so most industries show increases), but huge positive gains. A recent Forbes article (http://tiny.cc/9k89a) tells us that despite “the biggest property bust in a generation” REIT’s gave investors a 64% return in the last two years! That said, the article goes on to say REIT stocks are overpriced. If this holds true and real estate stocks go down in 2011, then I’ll bet my mortgage employee engagement in that industry will take a dive as well.

Get your free copy of this report by clicking here: 2011 Workplace Trends Report