The Voice of the World’s Employees
Every year Gallup produces a terrific report called State of the Global Workplace. It’s comprehensive, with over 112,000 business units from nearly 100 countries participating. With the tagline “The Voice of the World’s Employees,” the report examines how employees feel about their work and their lives. Regarding employee engagement, a major area of analysis, the 2022 report indicated that globally, only 21% of workers are engaged, which means that nearly 4 out of 5 workers are not engaged to one extent or another. The United States, at 35%, led globally in this category, but that still means that nearly two-thirds of US workers are not engaged at some level.
Gallup further determined that companies with higher engagement scores among their workers had less turnover, less absenteeism, higher profit margins, and fewer accidents, and these all make sense.
Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic era put a halt to a long period of gradual but general improvement among the world’s workers (Gallup’s 2022 report analyzed 2021 data). But the trend for the previous ten years was not exactly encouraging: engagement in 2013 was 12% and peaked at 22% in 2019, the year before the pandemic began. Dismal numbers, for sure, and reflective of an obvious engagement issue among workers everywhere.
When you consider how much a person’s life is spent at work—roughly 2,000 hours a year—that’s a lot of time to be feeling miserable or emotionally disconnected. Why, then, aren’t more people engaged and more companies making it happen?
We’ve seen laudable attempts by companies in the last few decades to move this needle. Organizations have tried a whole series of incentives and perks—allowing pets at work, setting up ping pong tables and other recreational activities, providing snacks, instituting flexible work hours, moving to four-day work weeks, helping with day-care issues, and having monthly team lunches or other company-sponsored social events. But the data indicate these have done little to make a difference in engagement.
What drives most people to be engaged at work are not always tangible things. What matters most to employees are things like being recognized for their contributions, given opportunities for growth and development, told the reason why things are done the way they are, being respected and listened to, shown their well-being matters, and that they are cared about and belong. In other words, they want to be treated like valuable human beings.
All of these intangibles are leadership issues, because how a leader leads not only makes a huge difference in whether employees are engaged—it is the key factor. And regarding how they lead and why engagement is such an issue, I maintain that most leaders don’t know how to be vulnerable, and that leads to poor engagement.
Vulnerability enables leaders to establish common ground with those they lead.
Genuinely sharing of yourself and allowing others to peek under the tent flap of who you are generates connection and fuels relationships—in other words, engagement. Notice I didn’t say move into the tent. Figuring out what to share about yourself and how much is part of the art of leading, and context matters. Vulnerability doesn’t need to have the same volume all the time, and there is a danger of oversharing. But unless leaders show the way to being vulnerable, to open up about themselves, to bury the notion that their personal and professional lives can and should be kept separate, they will not have an engaged workforce.
Getting to know your employees, inquiring about their lives, explaining why, empowering them, listening to them, having their backs, creating an open, inclusive environment, inspiring them, and recognizing them, all generate engagement. And, none of these initiatives means you cannot hold them to high standards of performance, but that’s a discussion for another day.
I had a terrific seven-year run with Target, and one of the things I loved about its culture was that it was recognition-intensive. Literally every meeting we had among our executives or with our team members began with recognition. Unstructured, free-flowing. Acknowledging others’ efforts and contributions publicly, thanking people for lending a hand or generating good ideas, sending them notes, following up personally with team members whose leaders said were doing a good job, were all powerful means to inspire and engage. And they cost next to nothing. We had among the highest scores in the company each year on Target’s annual Best Team Survey, which assessed team member engagement.
One thing I reinforced with my team was to always try and catch people doing things right, and then recognize them for that. Team member safety was always paramount and as leaders we were always on the lookout for violations, potential or in the moment, and then acting accordingly, but equally effective was calling out safe behaviors and acknowledging adherence to standards. Most team members would appreciate the minor effort made to do so.
It's remarkable to me how easy it is to be engaged if you want to be. Most people we are around on a regular basis want to talk about themselves, admittedly some more than others. If they don’t, they won’t. That’s doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. With effort even the most recalcitrant people will open up about something. Similarly, allowing others to know you, to peek under that tent flap, to share of yourself, doesn’t require a lot of effort, pre-planning, or strategizing. Just be yourself. Show the way—Lead.
What are your thoughts on engagement in the workplace? Please feel free to send me your thoughts here or email me directly at james.m.milano@gmail.com.