1: The news about employee engagement is distressing.
“For more than thirty years, the Gallup Organization has run in-depth behavioral economic research on more than twenty-five million employees across hundreds of U.S. organizations,” Fred Kofman writes in The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership.
First, the good news. The Gallup data shows that workgroups in the top quartile of engagement achieve strong financial results.
“Their profitability and productivity as a group are 22 and 21 percent higher, respectively,” Fred writes. “They see at least 25 percent less turnover. . . Highly engaged groups experience less absenteeism, and their work has fewer defects and safety incidents, too.”
Because engaged team members are “emotionally committed to the organization and its goals,” Fred notes, “they care deeply about their work and their company. They are willing to put their discretionary effort into the service of the company’s goals.
“They don’t just work for a paycheck, or for a promotion,” he observes, “but for the organization’s purpose—a purpose that they’ve made their own.”
2: The problem? Since the year 2000, the percentage of people who feel “actively engaged” at work—”those with the most innovative ideas, who create most of a company’s new customers, and who sparkle with the most entrepreneurial energy—hovers right below 30 percent,” Fred reports.
It gets worse from there. Rapidly. Almost 50 percent of workers are “disengaged” or checked out.
And around 20 percent of the workforce are actively disengaged and spreading discontent.
“Such people aren’t just unhappy at work,” Fred writes, “they are busy acting out their unhappiness, undermining their coworkers and criticizing the organization. These workers feel so hostile that they’re willing to resort to conscious or unconscious organizational sabotage.
“They become ‘detractors’ who spread their negative feeling throughout the company and beyond.”
The cost to the U.S. of this active disengagement? An estimated $450 to $550 billion annually.
The truth behind the numbers is sobering. “Gallup has found that the workplaces where employees feel disengaged suffer nearly 50 percent more accidents and are responsible for nearly 60 percent more quality defects and incur much higher health-care costs,” writes Fred.
Also distressing is that 60% of millennials—”the chunk of the U.S. workforce we would think has the most ideas and energy to offer”—are disengaged, too, Fred notes.
Gallup’s data shows that only 14 percent of millennials surveyed “strongly agree” that the mission or purpose of their company makes them feel their job is important.
Fred likens the situation with many companies today to “trying to cook in an oven with a crack through which it loses 85 percent of its heat.”
3: How do workers become disengaged?
“When people believe that no one—particularly their boss—cares for them,” Fred writes, “that they have no options or possibilities for growth, that their company is not a force for good in the world, and that there’s nothing they can do to change this, they lose self-confidence, pride, belonging, and any reason to believe that what they do is important to others.
“That’s how their work lives become meaningless,” he notes, “that’s how they actively disengage.”
Fred describes this mindset as “learned helplessness.” When this way of thinking takes hold, “everyone feels like a victim of forces beyond his or her control and constrained by budgets and processes imposed by alien authorities.
“Nobody feels free to take the initiative or even ask questions. Everyone blames some kind of external circumstance for his or her inability to act; nobody feels accountable.”
Transforming these types of organizations is not about superficial “engagement programs,” but a different type of leadership.
More tomorrow
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Reflection: Am I fortunate enough to work at an organization with a high level of associate engagement? How engaged am I at work? How about my colleagues?
Action: Discuss with a colleague or with my team.
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