Member Article

How to close the engagement gap

It’s HR focus week on Bdaily. Here, Stuart Baldwin, founder of The Positive Company, offers advice on how employers and employees can close the ’engagement gap’ to increase efficiency.

When consulting ï¬Ârm Towers Watson recently conducted a global workforce study interviewing 90,000 people in 19 different countries, they found 40% of employees were actively disengaged at work, 40% were enrolled (meaning they are capable enough but not fully committed to what they do) and only 20%, that’s 1 out of every 5 people are fully engaged at work…There is an Engagement gap.

Fortunately there is now a ton of research, not only on what drives people to be engaged at work, but the difference it makes to an organisation when people are engaged. We can now get a good, clear, evidence based sense of just how practically valuable Engagement is to organisations.

When I train leaders I often set a challenge, I ask “do they feel it’s possible for most of the people in their teams to love their jobs?” Around 70% of the people I ask feel uncomfortable with the idea that most people could love their work and say some version of no.

Only the most open and possibility oriented leaders seem to grab hold of this idea and say, “yes, and that should be my goal.” For me, the latter are right, it is possible in most teams and it absolutely should be the goal of every leader. But why? Because it makes people’s lives better? Yes. Because it makes everyone happier? Sure… But probably most persuasively because it makes the organisation signiï¬Âcantly more successful.

Engaged employees achieve more, go the extra mile, invent better ways of doing things, try harder, think more and are committed with their whole being to the success of the business. Organisations with Engaged employees are higher performing by every metric that matters. The research on this is rock solid, from multiple and reliable sources.

A story in the October 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review showed how Best Buy (the massive US electrical retailer) found that a 0.1% increase in employee engagement in one store is worth on average $100K per annum. Across the whole Best Buy organisation a 2% increase in employee engagement resulted in an additional $70 million in proï¬Âtability.

Discovering this led Best Buy to move to conducting employee engagement surveys quarterly rather than annually.

A 2006 Gallup study examined 24 thousand businesses and found that those with engagement scores in the top quartile had 12% higher proï¬Âtability, and those with engagement scores in the bottom quartile averaged up to 51% more employee turnover.

The Asia 2007 study found that organisations with high engagement are 78% more productive and 40% more proï¬Âtable than organisations with low levels of engagement.

Engaged organizations have 4 times the earnings per share (EPS) growth rate compared to organisations with lower engagement in their same industry according to a 2009 Gallup report from 152 global organisations.

The idea of employee Engagement as something that leaders should be responsible for and focus on only started to surface around 2001 and as a business community we are really still not that great at it. 75% of leaders have no engagement strategy even though 90% say engagement impacts on business success (ACCOR), and less than 50% of chief ï¬Ânancial ofï¬Âcers understand the return on their investments in human capital (Accenture).

This wealth of solid data clearly shows employee Engagement as the greatest opportunity for competitive advantage most organisations have.

Closing the Engagement gap is a leader’s responsibility. The research is clear, the single thing that makes the biggest difference to how engaged someone is at work is how they are led by their direct line manager.

It’s not about structures or rolled out company programmes… It’s about psychology. Your ability to understand people and grow the way they think and behave. To teach people how to develop their mindset and skills. But that’s hard right! Because people are weird, they do odd stuff that doesn’t always make sense, they have strange quirks of personality and they behave in stubborn and irrational ways. So it requires a special sensitivity and skill from a leader to understand and play the game that is engaging people.

My message is that ï¬Ârstly Engagement is a big deal and secondly it’s a crucial part of a leaders job. The question that remains is, how?… What can you practically do?

The research shows people who are Engaged in their jobs have 3 things in common:

1. They are good at what they do.

2. They are self directed, able to ï¬Ând their own path forward.

3. They enjoy what they do.

To put it another way - Performance, Empowerment and Happiness.

The challenge for the modern leader is to lead in a way that increases those 3 elements.

Fortunately in the last 15 years, there have been some ground breaking discoveries in the psychology of human performance that really help us to understand how people operate.

Built from this modern science we identiï¬Âed 6 practical leadership skills which drive Performance, Empowerment and Happiness in teams. They form the foundations of our Leadership training programme and we call them ‘Super Powers’.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Stuart Baldwin .