246: The State of the Global Workplace
Dear friends
Thank you for last week’s birthday wishes. I appreciated them. It was a wonderful weekend with all my favourite things – kayaking, good wine (2017 shiraz from Mullineux and Saronsberg, because I know you want to know), good food (spectacular osso buco), and good friends.
Wednesday, 23 April, was World Book Day. These six books are my choice for the current moment. I’d love to know your recommendations, so please comment on the post.
There won’t be a newsletter next Sunday. I am taking a break, which includes a few days at one of my favourite spots, Halfaampieskraal.
If this is your first time reading strategy, soul & self, you can subscribe here. Thank you to everyone who has recently shared my letter on LinkedIn and WhatsApp. It has led to a flurry of new subscribers. It is always gratifying to know you’re out there reading.
/strategy
This week, Gallup released its annual State of the Global Workplace, focusing on global employee engagement levels.
Engagement is a strong determinant of high performance and a key lever in improving organisational effectiveness.
You’re already paying people’s salaries; you may as well ensure you create an environment which motivates them to give their best. Not only is it good for business, it is good for the world. People who are happy and engaged at work, are happy and engaged in life. Change your workplace. Change the world.
Gallup always includes some staggering soundbites. This year’s includes “Last year, global employee engagement fell, costing the world economy US$438 billion in lost productivity” and “Gallup estimates that if the world’s workplace was fully engaged, US$9.6 trillion in productivity could be added to the global economy, the equivalent of 9% in global GDP”.
I’ll leave it to the economists amongst us to adjudicate on the veracity of the numbers. Whether it is billion or trillion, what we know is that when we are engaged, everything goes better and when everyone is engaged, businesses perform better.
The primary driver of declining engagement was a drop in manager engagement. It fell from 30% to 27%. Individual contributor engagement remained flat at 18%.
Peeling back the layers, young (under 35) manager engagement fell by five percentage points, and female manager engagement dropped by seven points.
And remember, seventy per cent of team engagement is attributable to the manager.
Disengaged manager, disengaged team, poor-performing workplace.
Underneath this are tough emotions. When asked which emotions they felt A LOT OF THE DAY yesterday, 40% of people said stress, 21% experienced anger and 22% loneliness. The US and Canada ranked the highest for stress (50%) and Sub-Saharan Africa the highest for loneliness (30%). (Read more about workplace loneliness and combatting it here).
Gallup (perhaps unsurprisingly) points to management training being a powerful driver of engagement. Management training can cut extreme disengagement in half.
When managers have someone at work who actively encourages their development, it nearly doubles their sense of thriving. Indeed, paying attention to the people around you and demonstrably caring for their growth, is an engagement ninja move and managers also need it (Read more about the power of paying attention here).
My clients know this quotation from Buckingham and Goodall’s Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World well. I have shared it before, so you may remember it.
“To create pervasive disengagement, ignore your people. If you pay them no attention whatsoever—no positive feedback; no negative feedback; nothing—your team’s engagement will plummet, so much so that for every one engaged team member you will have twenty disengaged team members… for those employees given mainly positive attention—that is, attention to what they did best, and what was working most powerfully for them—the ratio of engaged to disengaged rose to sixty to one. Positive attention, in other words, is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team. (It’s also, if you’re keeping score, twelve hundred times more powerful than ignoring people, but we haven’t yet come across a management theory that advocates ignoring people.)”
(You can read more on Buckingham’s research here).
How often are you guilty of ignoring your people? Skipping scheduled one-on-ones? Not scheduling any check-ins ever? Setting up team-building sessions and arriving late or leaving early? Simply neglecting to truly ask how they are before ‘straight to business’?
The numbers are scary, but we can choose to be better, and some businesses do. I know that many of you do.
Best-practice organisations have engagement levels of 70% compared to the 21% global mean. That’s a massive difference. To be exact, a two hundred and thirty-three percent difference.
And, if you feel you can’t change your company, you can change your team’s experience.
Remember 70% of engagement is affected by the manager. You might not be able to change the world, but you can change their world. And you start by paying attention.
(Here a few more letters about Gallup’s research over the years).
//self
We’ve just said positive attention is twelve hundred times more powerful than ignoring people.
How often do we ignore ourselves? We can go days, weeks, even years without pausing to check in on ourselves, to ask ourselves ‘how was today?’, ‘how am I doing?’. Typically, we wait for crisis to hit before reflecting.
A daily reflection habit is most powerful. Many people struggle with journaling, but it can be as simple as ‘What went well today?’ Paying attention to where and how you’re having impact is an easy way to stay engaged (and be happier).
If you want to supercharge that, ask yourself “To whom and where can I make a difference tomorrow? How?” Then do it. Congratulate yourself for doing it and feel warm and fuzzy.
If a daily diary is too much, try this experiment.
Choose a week. Observe yourself. See where you’re happiest and feel energised. Take note of what drains you. Examine three categories: what am I doing, how am I doing it, and who am I doing it with. If you’re feeling fancy, you add a fourth dimension ‘when you do it’. I find I enjoy somethings more if I do them in the morning, others more in the afternoon.
Then, in the next week shape your diary to do more of what energises you and less of what sucks. Identify:
- One thing you can stop.
- Two things you can spend less time on (social media for sure).
- Three things you should amplify or start (create minimums time commitments per month, that are both achievable and non-negotiable. This will give you the building blocks with which to structure your week).
You’ll feel better.
It feels obvious when detailed like this. It is. And still, we can get pulled along, failing to listen to ourselves, repeatedly doing what doesn’t serve us and feeling terrible. We can change it.
///soul
I am keeping these two quotations close to my heart:
“It’s not possible to constantly hold onto crisis. You have to have the love, and you have to have the magic. That’s also life” (Toni Morrison).
“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life” (Mary Oliver).
(They came to me via the Female Poets Society).
In the spirit of Morrison and Oliver, I am grateful for the 12 Swimmers for Humanity who today are marking South Africa’s Freedom Day by swimming from Robben Island to Bloubergstrand to raise funds for humanitarian aid in Palestine.
I’ll see you again on 11 May.
All the best
Karl
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