The 6 Sleeping Giants Stunting Productivity & Performance
Sleeping Giants
From our benchmarking research of human resource directors over the last few years at LifebyDesign.com.au we have found that there are six key obstacles (the sleeping giants) stopping organisations fully realising their workforce potential when it comes to employee engagement:
1. Employee Clarity (78%)
2. Time Poor (70%)
3. Skills, Tools & Resources (66%)
4. Inaction (62%)
5. Leader Buy-in & Commitment (57%)
6. Ineffective Solutions (40%)
Employee Clarity Creates Control and Empowerment
78% of respondents in the longitudinal study agree that employee clarity is the biggest of all the sleeping giants, standing in the way of effective employee engagement strategies.
Enlightened human resource leaders are becoming increasingly aware that getting employees clear on what engages and motivates them is the first and most important step in intelligently maximising workforce productivity and performance.
The fact is that most employees might know what they don’t want, what motivates and engages them, but fewer know what really does engage and motivate them. Psychologically if employees are not clear then it creates three problems:
1. Employees tend to default to pay and reward as the main motivator and potentially move back to a ‘whinge entitlement’ culture
2. People leaders will have virtually no chance of engaging them
3. Employees can’t take responsibility for their own engagement and motivation because they don’t know where to start
Employee Driven Engagement
The good news is that once employee clarity is achieved, 70-90% of engagement and motivation and therefore productivity & performance can be improved by the employee themselves – it’s just that until now most haven’t had the tools to know how.
For effective employee-driven productivity and employee engagement, a bottom-up approach is the way forward. This approach is employee activated, where everyone is treated as an individual, because broad-brush initiatives are too generic. So instead of implementing top-line initiatives, HR leaders who are serious about improving performance and productivity need to arm their people leaders and employees with the tools and resources to be able to do Personal Engagement Plans (PEP) and in doing so get individual employees to understand and be responsible for what engages and motivates them.
Get Your FREE People Glue Extract
As a way of staying thanks for being part of our Life by Design community we are releasing an extract of our People Glue book. 48 pages of thought provoking content on how to change the landscape of employee engagement as we know it now!
