What lies beneath the surface of our businesses in terms of the real level of staff engagement?

According to a 2012 study by Gallup “ State of the Global Workplace report”  85% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work.  Across all sectors.

Eighteen percent are actively disengaged in their work and workplace, while 67% are “not engaged.”

This latter group makes up the majority of the workforce — they are not your worst performers, but they are indifferent to your organisation.

They give you their time, but not their best effort nor their best ideas. They likely come to work wanting to make a difference — but nobody has ever asked them to use their strengths to make the organisation better.

This may not be your reality, or you may not perceive it to be, but the levels of disengagement are real, and the challenge it presents is real too.

How do we move staff from a transactional (money for time) mindset to one of transformational – where their key drivers are your values, vision, and purpose of your business or organisation? It appears that whatever “business” are doing in general at the moment, whatever engagement, appraisal, incentive and cultural development programmes are being used, the impact, on a macro scales is minimal, and it is likely to be so also for most businesses at the local level.

Here’s the thing..  The modern workforce is looking for things like purpose, opportunities to develop, ongoing conversations, a coach rather than a boss, and a manager who leverages their strengths rather than obsessing over their weaknesses. And this latter point is a challenge within most performance management systems.

Our staff see work and life as interconnected, and they want their job to be a part of their identity.

So let’s try something different? What does different look like?

Over recent years I have engaged with business leadership teams in an evolving manner as we have become aware of both the power and imperative to move away from conventional engagement (or lack of?) processes.

Some of the strategies we have employed have certainly had an impact, and I will develop some of them in articles and posts over coming weeks and months.

Let’s summarise a few here:

  • Marshall Goldsmith’s “Feed Forward” instead of “Feed Back” as a fresh and innovative / empowering mechanism to apply to appraisals and staff development
  • Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’s “Thought Cycle” as a means to understand impulsive decisions and interrupt negative thinking patterns
  • Thomas DISC profiling – as a tool to evaluate and adapt communication style preferences and help map and improve communications in leadership teams and beyond
  • Generalised Coaching principles such as “Above and Below the Line” and the “Identity Iceberg” to help individuals and team recognise and address unhelpful behaviours.

If engagement is a problem and, as it seems, a resilient one at that, then it is time to take a different approach.