Why does every article I read about employee engagement start with alarming numbers about the state of the global workforce? They seem to constantly revolve around a theme with sentences like: "Only 15% of workers worldwide are engaged. 67% of workers are not engaged. The vast majority of employees are psychologically not at work." I think both employees and HR professionals don't like these kinds of figures.
However, I understand why the authors of these articles refer to these numbers - they are trying to highlight the big problem of Employee Engagement today. I can't blame them, because Employee Engagement (or the lack of it) is something that every organization should care about. Of course, the authors of these articles and the companies that provide services in this field usually offer solutions to solve the coming "great employee engagement crisis" and "increase employee engagement". But is the employee engagement situation in companies really as bad as they say?
Myths and Realities:
These "scary quotes and figures" are designed to do just that: Scare you into hiring a consultant to keep all your employees from slacking off. But it is clear that they are misleading you with these numbers. Some survey companies arrive at these scary numbers because they make employee engagement a binary equation: "You are either fully engaged or not engaged at all". . If they measure employee engagement on a scale of 1-5, they can measure 5 to mean fully engaged. If 15% of your employees gave a score of 5, the survey company would say that the 85% who scored between 1-4 (and 4 is not a bad score at all) are not engaged! That's how the scary numbers come out. Some companies try to address their own products and services with the "Gallup says that 67% of employees are not engaged" approach, using the scary slogans of "Gallup says Gallup says we are not engaged". However, it is a question mark whether the survey data available today from global consulting firms, including Gallup, covers the engagement status of employees all over the world.
I am also very skeptical about the data presented by all these companies. Look, Gallup says in this article that only 15% of the world's workers are engaged in their work, while in the US this figure is 35%!!! Anyone who has traveled to the US and other countries around the world and has enough experience to compare the US with other countries would be skeptical about these figures. Having been to America at least twenty times in my lifetime, I can say that the unhappiness of the average American worker with his/her job is reflected in every aspect of his/her life and I think that the work engagement of American workers cannot be higher than the world average as it is said here. In America, the unhappiness of middle and low income level employees is very evident and customers can easily feel it. Whether this person is a housekeeper in a hotel, a reservation clerk in a car rental company, a waiter in a restaurant or an air hostess in an airline, they reflect their boredom directly to the customers. The group we call white-collar usually lives in a very monotonous work routine. He will not lift a finger for a job that should be done on behalf of his company but is not his responsibility.
So I believe that these numbers that are flying around are distorted and most of them are myths, so please let's try to use some common sense. Do you really think, as Gallup says, that more than 4/3 of your workforce is not at all interested in what happens at work? This goes against basic human nature. It goes back to the idea of decades ago, that employees are trying to do the least they can, even doing some minor sabotage to business processes.
We are not against surveys and polls. On the contrary, it is a big part of what we do in the Success Program. But employee engagement surveys should be precision tools, not blunt instruments, and the results should be applied with some constraint. Otherwise, we are likely to make critical business decisions based on erroneous interpretations of what is actually happening in our organization.
Employee Engagement Spectrum:
Employee Engagement is not a binary state (either you are engaged or you are not). Employee Engagement is a continuum, a spectrum. It has many levels and changes over time. For example, if you ask me at hour 13 of a 16-hour flight in economy class how engaged I am in my job, I will probably give you an answer that skews your employee engagement scale. At that moment, employee engagement doesn't even mean anything to me. But it doesn't usually mean how engaged I am in my job, I mean I love what I do and I'm very engaged. So it's the employee engagement that changes and evolves over a period of time that makes the real difference. We categorize the data collected from the results of more than 14 million employee engagement surveys conducted so far by our partner Decision Wise into 4 categories. Although Decision Wise conducts surveys in various countries around the world, I would like to say clearly that this data does not reflect the world average, but mostly reflects US data like others. Unfortunately, there is still no large-scale research in Turkey to average the employee engagement scores of all our companies.
Here are the Engagement Results by Category
Fully Connected (23%)
They are the organization's most enthusiastic champions and their enthusiasm is tangible and contagious. They are constantly learning and taking calculated risks, they feel they can step outside their comfort zone, they feel personal satisfaction with the quality of their work, they feel that work can be stressful but also fun, and they love their work.
Key Contributors (49%)
They meet performance expectations, they do what they know how to do well without taking too many risks, they are attuned to leadership, they often do not feel challenged in their work, they actively contribute and get involved on a day-to-day basis, even if they do not necessarily love their work. We describe these people as "strong and ready".They make up the bulk of the workforceand are often performers. But the majority of their work is transactional rather than transformational. They get things done, but spend limited time on innovation, improving processes or breaking the status quo. These employees are involved in the process, but they are far from giving their all to their work.
Opportunity Group (24%)
They feel that their personal skills and competencies are underutilized at work. They use too many working hours to fulfill their personal needs, they do just enough to keep out of trouble and save the job, they rarely speak up, they work mainly for the paycheck, and they essentially stand still. In our interviews and focus groups with these people, we found that many of those in the opportunity group are actually people who could potentially produce the best performance, but are worn out. They are often difficult to identify because they are silent, disengaged and suffering, and in doing so they mentally and emotionally withdraw. They do not speak out, but their contribution is limited. They are "swing votes". As the name suggests, there is a great opportunity to attract this group to higher levels of employee engagement. Yet if nothing is done, they leave the organization, either for psychological reasons or because they are physically tired.
Unaffiliated (4%)
They get bored and frustrated at work; they say negative things about the work, the company and the leadership; they tend to blame others for their own failures; and they tend to stay and consciously and unwittingly sabotage things rather than quit. They are often the most vocaland contagious group of negativity within the organization. They can be as invasive and toxic as cancer. Most leaders ignore this group because they are few in number. However, even one such person in a team has a significant negative impact. On the other hand, because they are so vocal about their dissatisfaction and lack of engagement, management teams often spend a lot of unproductive time addressing their demands.
People move in and out of these 4 engagement categories periodically or seasonally, depending on their manager, the environment, the incentives and the stage of their career and life. It's a complex and fluid pattern that is more akin to the character of a team or organization, rather than alarming (and inaccurate) statistics thrown out as a scare tactic. It also means that the claim that 85% of your employees are job hunting is a myth. We don't have any data yet, but with the pandemic, employees are likely to focus more on their current job rather than looking for a new one. Just as companies focus more on delighting their existing customers than on finding new ones.
So is there any reason to worry about employee engagement? Our answer would be a clear "yes", but does that mean all hell is breaking loose? It's pointless to claim that 85% of the workforce "doesn't give a damn." If they did, you'd already be bankrupt. So, the most important steps to increase engagement are for your employees and managers to first understand the true meaning of employee engagement and then take action.