As Ishan Galapathy (an operational excellence strategist, author, speaker and mentor) highlighted in his last Executive PA article, engaged employees only account for 23% of the workforce. The actively disengaged category represents 18% and the fence-sitting, quietly quitting, not engaged group accounts for a whopping 59%…
“The impact of the not engaged group on the global economy is a staggering US$8.8 trillion – or 9% of the global GDP. Imagine having a team of ten rowers on your boat. Three are rowing their hearts out. Five are sitting with their arms crossed adding dead weight. And two are rowing in the opposite direction. How fast do you think your boat is going now?
The last 15 years have seen a fairly consistent upward trends in engaged employees. But the overwhelming volume of the disengaged signals a huge source of untapped talent.
The expert advice
We’ve tried to ‘manage’ this situation by using drivers recommended by Gallup:
- Purpose: This helps us to connect organisational purpose in an inspiring way. But unless we get individuals connected with the purpose through practical activities and initiatives, it just ends up being another poster on the wall or slide for your presentation.
- Development: This generally helps to advance the careers of the already engaged The quiet ones don’t get a lot of attention.
- Caring manager: While a caring manager improves engagement, the issue is that the accountability is on a single individual or department.
- Ongoing conversations and focusing on strengths: These are essential elements, but providing opportunities to raise concerns or improvement ideas without following through doesn’t drive engagement. In fact, it works in the opposite direction. Employees get frustrated that management hasn’t done anything about their ideas or has rejected them without reason.
From disengaged to involved
If you don’t have systems and processes to capture ideas, and then collate, prioritise and execute them, you’re better off not asking employees for improvement ideas at all. Managers need to get employees involved in solving the issues – their input is what drives engagement.
Take any change management framework, such as Kotter, ADKAR or Kübler-Ross. Take any coaching framework, such as GROW. What do these all have in common? They all prioritise the involvement and buy-in of employees. This is the holy grail.
It’s not that hard
Having worked across multiple companies and countries for the last 25 years, I know for a fact that the fence-sitting, quietly quitting employees are only seemingly disengaged. You may think that these employees turn up in body only. But I’ve found they are waiting to be discovered, leveraged and motivated.
The secret to engaging the seemingly disengaged is involvement. Get them involved in the right initiatives with the right teams, led by the engaged few. Share their success stories at your town hall meetings to infuse positivity.
Over time, you’ll notice the ship is turning faster than expected; the fence-sitters are starting to become believers. You’ll notice their growing willingness to lead initiatives. If you stay with this strategy, you’ll continually improve both productivity and engagement.”
