Let’s get engaged — right now!

Does leading meetings feel like an uphill battle, with little constructive input, some vocal disruption, and mostly silent polite participation? If you recognize any part of that description, your employees are likely disengaged. You’re not alone: it’s a global pandemic, with 8 out of 10 employees having checked out, which correlates with lower profitability and customer loyalty; the only metric that benefits is employee absenteeism. But this situation can be fixed by bold commitment to a change program.

Three key takeaways

1. Engaged employees are strongly committed to the mission and values of the organization they work for. They feel a strong sense of belonging and are passionate contributors to a motivating, positive organizational culture and its business success. Unfortunately, only 2 out of 10 people globally fall into this category. The rest are either quietly checked out and doing as little as they can get away with, or vocally frustrated and disruptive.
2. There is a 49% correlation between employees feeling valued, involved and connected to the mission, and composite business performance. Organizations in the most engaged quartile outperform those in the least engaged by 18% in sales productivity, 23% in profitability, 10% in customer loyalty, and 66% in employee wellbeing with an accompanying reduction of 81% absenteeism.
3. Committing to employee engagement brings improvements in business and people metrics from the start, and applying best practices ensures these trends continue for the long-term. But change like this needs focus and effort. Kick off the process firstly by establishing engagement as a strategic priority. Then, seek help: people have done this before and can get you to your destination via a quicker and more direct route than you can alone. And thirdly, trust your people to put you on the right track by actively listening to their feedback and suggestions to improve your organizational culture.

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Do you recognize this train of thought while leading meetings?

“____ [Add your expletive of choice], leading this meeting is hard work. Surely it wasn’t always this hard!

“At least Angela and Evan are paying attention and enthusiastic as usual, and I know that they’ll volunteer, for whatever ideas we manage to grind out. They really want to learn and make a difference and I’m grateful they’re so committed, but sometimes I wish we could hear some different perspectives. Still, what can I do when no one else puts up their hand any more?

“Dom and Delilah have really become negative. It feels like they argue against whatever I share for the sake of it, even though they’ve stopped sharing their own ideas. They used to be on fire! What happened? Sometimes it feels like a stand-off between them, and Angela and Evan; if only they’d be more constructive.

“The other five might as well not be here. I can’t get a sense of how they’re feeling from their expressions, they look blank, although a few of them seem to be typing quite actively. Perhaps they’re taking notes. They don’t contribute anything unless I ask them directly, and when I do they don’t really add any value. I’d almost rather have Alejandro’s and Mei’s vitriol; at least they add some energy to the meeting.

“Perhaps the importance of this meeting is making everyone nervous. Yes, that’s probably it. How could anyone who works here not care about our recent terrible customer satisfaction ratings? If our competitor hears about this, they’ll think that all their holidays have come early. Although perhaps they have heard about it because another three people left last week, and I’m sure one or two of them have gone to that competitor. Such a shame: they were some of our most experienced people. I used to love working with them.

“I wish we could get some of the passion and commitment back. I used to get such a buzz from these kinds of calls. I wonder who’s looking at this situation? Someone must be. Perhaps it’s HR? Or is it the Chief-of-Staff? Whoever it is will probably come to me for some input soon.

“Let’s get this meeting done and on to something else. Only 20 minutes to go.”

I am sorry if you recognize it. I know that the feeling is horrible. It’s exhausting. The consequences seem to pervade every area of your life.

Organizations with teams like this are flourishing all over the world, so why bother to take action? I’ll give you two reasons. One is that your employees are doing an incredible job despite this situation and deserve an organizational culture that will recognize their contributions and keep on enabling them to develop. The second is that if you can start to improve this situation, and perhaps convert one of the five silent meeting attendees into a collaborator of Angela and Evan, you will enjoy business benefits according to whichever metric you care to measure by.

Research shows that there is a 49% correlation between composite business performance and employees feeling valued, involved and connected to the mission (references are at the end). Breaking the composite down and highlighting a few of the metrics investigated, the top quartile outperforms the bottom quartile by 18% in sales productivity, 23% in profitability, and 10% in customer loyalty. Employee wellbeing is 66% higher and absenteeism is reduced by 81%. If you work out what the financial value of these benefits are to your organization, I bet it’s a lot.

Where do you begin? I always like to start by applying labels to complex, ambiguous, emotional situations like this. In my experience, naming something makes it less threatening, and more addressable. What I have described are some elements of a disengaged culture. If you are part of such a culture, then take heart in knowing that you are not alone. The story may be (historical) fiction, but the numbers I shared are real: 8 out of 10 people globally and across industries (77%, to be accurate) are disengaged.

Dom and Delilah are the actively disengaged participants in this meeting of 10 people (18% are actively disengaged). They still care enough to be vocal about their frustration because they can remember when this organization was a different place, and they are sad that it has changed. They have fed back honestly and courageously via endless surveys and through their managers, sharing examples and suggestions, but they can’t see any impact. They are not ready to give up on the organization because they have history here; they used to love it and recommend to their friends that they should work here, but they have become cynical. They are still trying to make a difference, but they don’t know where to direct their efforts anymore; they are in ‘friendly fire’ mode, disrupting meetings and undermining success.

The five people who we didn’t name are also disengaged, but passively so. They don’t bother fighting to change anything anymore. They have checked out and are doing as little as possible while not giving their manager a reason to reprimand them because they just want their pay checks. They don’t know why Dom and Delilah are bothering because they are certain no one is listening and that nothing will change. They are busy typing during the meeting, but I don’t think they’re noting; more likely they’re discussing the meeting with each other in a back channel.

59% employees globally are passively disengaged, and in my version, this includes the person leading the meeting. They’re not actively trying to secure input from participants. They are marking time until the end of the meeting. They can see serious consequences to both the commercial health of the organization and to its cultural health but are assuming that someone else is taking the lead to fix the situation.

Label affixed. This culture is disengaged. How can we take the first steps to fix it?

First: accountability. Appoint someone in your leadership team to be accountable for your organizational culture, and make improving its health a strategic priority. The situation we’ve described will not fix itself; even when individuals valiantly try to improve things for their teams, going it alone is so draining that it’s not sustainable. The only thing that will happen if organizational disengagement is left to its own devices is that the downward spiral will continue.

Second: seek help. You’re not the only organization in this situation, and there are people who have experience solving it that they would like to share with you. Designing and building a more engaged culture for the long-term is achievable, but it’s hard, especially when you don’t have existing capability and probably face a lot of skepticism that what you’re starting will deliver results. External help can get you to your destination using the quickest and most direct route possible, and it will boost your belief in the strategy you develop. My approach, for instance, is based on neurodivergence inclusion backed up with healthy doses of change management and psychology, and I’ve experienced its transformative effect.

Third, look to your organization. The great news is that your employees are giving you clues about what kind of changes will work in your culture. They are trying to tell you what they want. There is something about the situation that is working for Angela, Evan and the 23% engaged employees globally. They feel a sense of connection to your organization’s mission, and they want to better serve your customers. They are stretching themselves to learn new skills by contributing and sharing ideas to help solve problems. Whatever that “something” is can be identified and scaled out to others as part of an engagement implementation plan.

Taking your first steps to improve employee engagement will bring benefits in productivity, innovation, retention, collaboration, resilience and profitability almost from the outset of the program, and applying established best practices ensures your gains continue to be amplified over years to come.

References

Employee engagement statistics are taken from Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report.

Statistics about improvement in business outcomes are taken from Gallup’s 2020 Meta-Analysis: The Relationship Between Engagement at Work and Organizational Outcomes.