The State Of The Global Workplace

The Global Workplace

We thought it might be useful to take a moment to reflect on the engagement front via some figures from Gallup’s ‘State of the Global Workplace Study’:

  • Worldwide only 13% of employees across 142 countries are engaged in their jobs
  • In Australia specifically,
    *  24% of employees are engaged;
    *  60% are not engaged; and
    *  16% are actively disengaged. 

Relevant Touch Points For Australia

Productivity
Productivity is critical to the every organisations bottom line, but exactly how much?

           Organisations with an average of 9.3 engaged employees for every actively disengaged employee, experienced 147% higher earnings per share compared with their competition.*

Organisations having realised and invest in engagement accordingly, experience significantly higher productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction, higher retention, lower absenteeism and a better safety record.

So, the bottom line is confirmed: Engagement = Performance & Productivity = Profitability

Leadership

In Aus/ NZ only 19% of employees in leadership positions are engaged in their jobs*

This is startling, given that leaders have to be the catalyst to increasing their peoples’ productivity and performance.  It is imperative that leaders are as motivated and as engaged as possible.  After all, we are trusting with our organisational talent capital with these people.

We must ensure that leadership have the skills, tools and resources to maximise their people’s engagement and motivation potential, simply and easily.  This could be as simple as a 15 minute Personal Engagement Plan (PEP) discussion with an individual employee every six to 12 months.

Why not make a PEP discussion part of the formal performance review process?  Adding the PEP to what is usually such a employer-centric event, will bring immediate results, showing employees recognition and understanding that the process is much more than just a tick-the-box affair.

Employee Clarity

28% of College educated graduates were ‘engaged’ versus 32% of High School Educated graduates.*

So higher levels of education doesn’t necessarily mean higher engagement.  While the reasons weren’t explored, we would suggest that higher levels of education bring with them higher expectations, which if and when they aren’t meet, can sometimes equal disengagement.   The distinction lies between Expectation and Clarity.

What we have seen time and time again is that most people can tell you what they don’t want, fewer can tell you what they do want.  And if your people don’t know what they want, how can we intelligently engage them?

From our experience, 70-90% of engagement can be driven by the employee themselves – they just have to know what’s important to them, what they can do about it, and sometimes don’t feel empowered to make a difference in their immediate work environment.

Think Global, Act Local

Engagement research is all well and good, so long as you ask the right questions and follow up that up with relevant actions.  But even then, most engagement initiatives, when based on the overall findings of a global (or national or even divisional) survey, will miss the mark.  Why – One Size Doesn’t Fit All.

Everyone is different, and everyone is motivated and engaged by different things.  The missing link to effective engagement is to first understand which engagement drivers motivate individuals the most. Only then can organisations and employees start to develop strategies and solutions that uniquely engage individuals and then create a more productive and better performing team of individuals

For further infomation on Life by Design Systems and Tools – click here

 

(* Findings published in Gallup State of the Global Workplace Study)

 

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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!

People Glue Extract - Click Here For Instant Access

 

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