Employee engagement is more critical than we might think
We are hearing more and more about the importance of employee engagement. Still, sometimes we don’t realize just how much low employee engagement costs our organisations. In a recent interview with Adam Bryant and David Reimer, the Global Head of Human Capital at Apollo gives us some insight into how painfully high those costs can be:
“[…] the failure rate of corporate strategies is about 70 percent. And when you unpack that, you find it’s almost always because of talent issues […] and in HR, one of our best metrics are employee engagement surveys, which typically show the same answer across companies — twenty percent of people are highly engaged in their jobs. As an economist, I look at that and say, wow, you’ve got an 80 percent failure rate of getting people to feel like they’re doing the best work they’re capable of, and most strategies don’t work because of the people issues.”
Low employee engagement directly affects the bottom line. Low employee engagement is often found in workplaces where employees feel anonymous, irrelevant, and unable to measure their success. When employees are less engaged, morale suffers, meetings become dull and ineffective, and they can even end up leaving the organisation. This often translates into a loss of competitive advantage over time.
The long-term effects of low employee engagement and morale on an organisation can be devastating because it makes your employees less productive, meetings become horrible and boring, teamwork is limited to distributing work, and you end up losing your competitive edge over time.
Thankfully, the solution is simple.
“As an economist, I look at that and say, wow, you’ve got an 80 percent failure rate of getting people to feel like they’re doing the best work they’re capable of, and most strategies don’t work because of the people issues.”
Matthew Breitfelder, Global Head of Human Capital at Apollo
The Truth about Employee Engagement
Patrick Lencioni and the Table Group have seen time and time again over the past 25 years that three things tend to cause employees to become disengaged with their work: anonymity, irrelevance, and “immeasurement.” Patrick has also written a book about this called “The Truth about Employee Engagement.”
Here’s a summary of these three signs of job misery:
Anonymity
When employees don’t feel like they are known, they don’t feel like they belong. They will feel like an outsider. On the surface, things seem fine, for they put in the hours they are required to and will do what they need to. But they will ultimately only be doing it for a paycheck.
Irrelevance
Likewise, when an employee doesn’t see that her job matters to someone, she doesn’t feel fulfilled. She needs to know that someone in the organisation cares about what she is doing; otherwise, she will become unhappy. She will do the 9-5, but if there’s an opportunity out there that she feels will make her more appreciated, she will go for it.
Immeasurement
Finally, when we don’t feel like we can gauge how successful we are in our work as a part of the big picture, we suffer from “immeasurement.” We don’t like merely doing work; we want the satisfaction of knowing how well we are doing against some benchmark. If we are doing tasks because they are passed down to us, but we can’t see them connected to something bigger, it will take a massive toll on our engagement.
Pathways out of misery
If you want to solve the anonymity problem, for example, it comes down to being human. We go through our busy days assigning tasks as if that were enough. Sometimes we are so afraid of asking the wrong questions and getting into trouble that we end up holding people at arm’s length and isolating them. If things are done like this, nobody wins.
While it’s true that people do have a right to their privacy, people also crave connection. And the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You can ask questions that aren’t probing, such as “how are you today?” You may laugh at this, but it can be that simple.
You have to be sincere, though, because insincerity does not do you any favors. It just complicates things even more. You may have a lot on your plate, but if you ask how they are doing while you check your watch, that will not help you overcome the barrier of anonymity. However, if you ask this question sincerely, you will find that your people will see that you care. They will begin not to feel so anonymous anymore.
Remember that saying, “people don’t leave companies; they leave their managers”?
Now you know why.
