“Engagement doesn't actually mean anything on its own without understanding the constituent parts. Which is, I think, why a lot of organisations still struggle with the concept. Engagement is actually simply a small bucket within the bigger bucket of human capital. And just as each organisation needs to decide what human capital it needs, it needs to define engagement for itself “(Jon Ingham, 2009).

Finding data on the cost of employee turnover is easy – many researchers have been able to quantify the monetary value of losing valued employees. However, many costs occur that can’t be assigned a Rand value. These “costs’ can far outweigh the traditional, monetary calculations – and organisations are incurring huge, unseen losses in productivity, customer satisfaction, reputation among job-seekers and, signif icantly, in the morale of the departing employee’s co-workers. Examples of this are: