By now the benefits of having engaged employees – teams who come to work with their whole self and genuinely care about doing a good job – should be nothing new to you. But just in case they are, here’s a taste:
Highly engaged employees take 41% fewer sick days. They have 21% higher productivity, and 17% higher sales. They make 17% fewer mistakes. This is what the actual statistics say. Companies with the majority of highly engaged employees earn on average twice the revenue of companies whose employees drag their feet on the way to work.
And it makes sense, doesn’t it? If your team is dragging their feet on their way to work, then dragging their feet while they perform their work, they are not getting as much done as they could. They are not happy, and that unhappiness has a big impact on your results as a leader.
But employee engagement goes deeper than that – much deeper. In fact, part of what I am about to show you is that by creating a workplace that enables a high engagement in your staff, you are actually doing something more meaningful than increasing your profit (although that is definitely nice). You’re doing a public service, and improving the community around which you work. You’re bringing happiness by reducing the effects caused by many workplaces like depression, anxiety and fatigue. By improving your people, you’re improving the community, and by improving the community you’re improving the broader world around you.
In creating a workplace that has engaged employees, you are bringing meaning to your people’s work. Given that we spend the majority of our time at work (apart from sleeping), you are now giving meaning to their life. In giving meaning to a person’s life, you are meeting more of their basic and enhanced needs that, according to Maslow, bring happiness. In bringing happiness you are reducing things like depression. You’re reducing illness, as happy people have been proven to get sick less often (41% less often, actually).
If you’ve read any form of leadership literature over the past year there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the epidemic that is sweeping the globe, and has been for some time. No country is safe – whether it is a first world country with all the benefits a person could want, or a third world country where workers are truly exploited.
That epidemic is employee engagement.
Low engagement across the world in what should be a meaningful endeavor – work, has strangled productivity and is robbing employees around the world of their energy and happiness. You see, it’s only in the last 100 years that work has really been separate from the management and planning. And that separation has led to meaningless work, separated from the customers who benefit or the outcomes they produce.
Now more than 70% of employees, even in first world countries, are disengaged in their work.
I’ve put together a manifesto with a clear step-by-step guide to improving employee engagement, and below are the sources for research that all point to the same thing: We crave clarity, regular checking in from our leaders where they focus on our strengths, and continuous improvement, and despite what you may have experienced the meaning we can get from normal every day jobs runs very deep.
Let’s check it out!
The State of the Global Workplace, Gallup
Growth Mindset
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Hertzberg’s Two Factor Theory
Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world
High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being
Eustress versus Distress
Harvard Forces of Employee Engagement
Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation
SWOT Analysis For Management Consulting (Albert Humphrey)
Do Employees Really Know What’s Expected of Them? Gallup
The Million Dollar Checklist: Sustaining reductions in catheter related bloodstream infections
The Person and the Situation – effects of environment on motivation
Universal and Cultural Dimensions of Optimal Experiences
Motivating Language Theory
The Art of Motivating Employees
Driving Engagement by Focusing on Strengths
Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance
Harvard, The Easiest Way To Change People’s Behavior
Timing Matters: The Impact of Immediate and Delayed Feedback on Learning
The Power of Feedback
Google’s research on Clarity and Meaning
First, the statistics on the current engagement epidemic.
Playing The Leadership Card Game, With Lean Expert Phil Preston
You may have heard about the Leadership Card Deck – an incredible card deck (and associated, collaborative game and ice-breaker with your teams) that teaches ways to increase motivation and engagement within your teams, as a leader. And everyone can be a leader.
You can now buy your very own copy of the Leadership Card Deck to improve the leadership ability of the people around you, from almost anywhere in the world on beautiful linen-card paper. They really are a pleasure to use.
Transcript:
David McLachlan: Hey everyone I just wanted to show you something that we worked on over the last couple of months and it relates to ease-of-use and it relates to engagement and it relates to disrupting companies, creating disruptive companies and all of those things that come from
ease-of-use and making things easy to do and easy to use.
And come out of it is the the leadership card deck which helps improve the
engagement of your teams, that has huge flow-on effects like improving the
profitability and productivity of your people, making people want to come to
work and do a good job and I had to bring Phil along –
Phil Preston: Hello!
David: – because as we’ve been playing we’ve sort of evolved this game from the leadership card deck just by playing it over the last couple of weeks. And the way it’s evolved is really really great, you’re gonna love playing it as well. And Phil’s probably one of the best people to play this because he’s probably one of the most hardcore lean practitioners in the southern hemisphere I would say. He’s had training at Ford, from Toyota guys, he has a manufacturing background but also financial services, formal stuff like Six Sigma and not only that Phil does that as a day job and then teaches lean on the weekends as well, so he can’t get enough of it.
Phil: I am so passionate David.
David: But also so good at it.
Phil: Thank you.
David: And that’s how this sort of evolved over the last couple of weeks.
Phil: I love the game, I’m ready to go.
David: So did you want to walk people through how we’ve been playing?
Phil: Okay, so we started off with the cards, and on each of the cards is – how would you describe it David?
David: Oh it’s just a tip, a bit of research or a trick, how to improve engagement how to get the most out of your teams, that sort of thing.
Phil: So when we initially started playing the game we just picked three cards each and then we would try to make them flow. But the game’s evolved, where we originally thought it would all start off with the root cause and end up with a solution, but sometimes that’s not always the case. Anyway we’ll demonstrate to you how this works.
David: Let’s do it and yeah and that’s why playing with Phil in this manner is such a pleasure because he totally gets it and he gets that improving things just makes the way for making happier staff as well so that’s really one of the greatest treasures that you’ll get out of this I think. So you said take three cards – one two three – and when Phil says you “make it flow”, what we’re doing is we’re just arranging the cards in the order that we believe they fit, and you’ll see you can ask your people to do so and you can use this as an icebreaker for a meeting for any sort of you know improvement situation or a talk that you’re giving, you can use this as a great icebreaker for your teams and get them thinking about improvements before you delve into those things or any other meeting that you’re running and you just have your people take the three cards and read out the cards that they get.
Phil: Okay so I’ll go first – so Not Invented Here. Okay and could you just read that little description there David?
David: Not invented here, the tendency to rate our own business ideas as more successful than other people’s concepts. So it’s just hard for us to to rate other people’s ideas as better than our own, or take them on board even when sometimes they might be better. I think we’ve all been there but yeah that’s a really good one.
Phil: So an unusual mix this time to be fair. So this is a difficult one! So not invented here how do we make that consistent with the view to try and improve that concept?
David: So let’s find the cards that work around, that are similar.
Phil: Okay with this so let’s “make it repeatable”, even though it is a concept and almost the culture of thinking but if we can repeat and embed some form of consistency around that thinking we’ll make it repeatable –
David: – And that helps the not invented here.
Phil: I think so.
David: I’ve got this one, which I want to sort of bring into the mix as well and it’s the curse of knowledge. So once you have knowledge of a particular
subject it’s hard to imagine others not having that same knowledge and I
think I mean where where would we put that before or after not invented here?
Phil: I would put it after yeah.
David: Not invented here caused from the curse of knowledge, solved by making it repeatable in your teams, and then what else have you got?
Phil: To improve the repeatability make it visual.
David: Make it visual so people can clearly see what’s expected of them, that’s fantastic! Is that all yours? Phil’s done already. I’ve got two more – mastery which is when your team is able to be to working continuously towards mastering a worthy skill, it’s an intrinsic motivator and it actually motivates people more than money in some cases so working towards a worthy skill if you’ve put all of this in place then you’re working towards mastery, it’s more
of an intrinsic motivator than than money or gifts or bonuses or rewards in
many cases.
Phil: Yeah that could hover across quite a few to be honest. Leave it there but I think we leave it at the end because that’s pretty much to where we’re aspiring towards.
David: I like it! And lastly sales and satisfaction, as the effects of engagement. I don’t know if you can see that but companies in the top quartile of engagement achieved 10% higher customer satisfaction than companies in the lowest quartile of staff engagement,
Phil: Which leads into mastery because you’ve got autonomy and intrinsically motivated teams.
David: So your team mates are more engaged, they’re happy to come to work, they’re working on something that’s of value to them and now all of a sudden that impacts the sales and satisfaction of the company as well.
Phil: Yeah so you know you’ve got the – you started off with not invented here which is a sort of culture – a cultural waste in a way – you’ve then got the curse of knowledge as well which how would you interpret the curse of knowledge following that one?
David: In that people find it hard to see the value in other people’s ideas
above their own.
Phil: So this is the view together – so make it repeatable then make the thinking repeatable or make the culture repeatable – make the process repeatable – to provide the consistency.
David: And then we’re back into making the process visual, helps people work towards mastery continuously, brings in satisfaction. And see the way that
that evolved was that and this could go any way because all it is is a discussion around the way we think that it should flow and sometimes people play
it differently.
Phil: They do but I think that if you look at the real sort of standout aspects of this, is make it repeatable, make it visual, and then master it. I love it, that’s really good.
Employee Engagement Research & Sources