Why Employee Engagement Is SO Important

So, according to Gallup, only 13% of the workforce is actively engaged, and fully 70% in the United States are disengaged, and 24% self-report as what we call actively disengaged, which means these people hate their jobs so much that they’re actually sabotaging their employers or the people who will stuff a half-eaten tuna fish sandwich in the panel of a car they’re manufacturing so that the client who buys the car will hate the car. These are the people that are actively destructive of the workforce and undoubtedly are the negative Nellies and Debbie downers that we sometimes talk about. And some of you might feel like you’re one of them or you’re victimized by an organization around you that has so many people who are disengaged and not enjoying their jobs. While we’re speaking with a really interesting client this week, I’m in an airport in Indianapolis, and it’s just on my mind to talk about this whole idea of Employee Engagement through the lens of emotional intelligence as a way that we can actually make big improvements. So stay tuned, that’s coming right up.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. And so, this client I’ve got here in Indianapolis is in a genuine crisis. The labor shortage is so acute that they cannot run their plant and meet the needs and the customer expectations of people who are buying huge orders of necessary parts so that these people that I’m working with have become part of the supply chain problem that’s rampant in North America around the world. And the crisis point is no longer actually getting raw materials for them; the issue is actually having enough people to do the work so that managers and supervisors and all kinds of people are actually down on the plant for doing the job that they can’t hire anybody to do, and people are leaving, and they’re having an incredibly difficult time recruiting. So we talked with this client about some of these strategies, and in the short term, it’s all about reaching out to niche community groups to recruit people who are usually the underserved part of the community, so there’s opportunity in low-income places and people who are racially typically oppressed, LGBTQ+ communities, disabled immigrants, those kind of things, reach out to the communities that are underserved and niche market to them because if you’re just competing on Indeed or LinkedIn and trying to market to the whole world to come and apply for a job, you’re probably not going to be particularly successful, given that there’s just a sea of other employers also looking on that space. So that’s the short-term solution, I suppose, but the medium-term solution is to create a workplace that’s so positive, that has employees that are so engaged that A) they won’t leave and B) they become the best salespeople to say, “Come and work here,” you know, they tell their friends and family this is the ideal place. And we know through various studies that Employee Engagement is primarily driven by management. You know, it’s their responsibility to create the conditions for success and positive emotions, but what’s often gets missed is that it’s the front-line leaders that are the most important strategic leverage point to make that difference. It’s all well and good if the most senior managers think that the culture should be one thing or another, but unless they’re actively on the front lines persuading, providing for, and taking care of their front line, then the workforce will not become engaged. So if the front-line leaders are that opportune place to actually influence the thoughts, beliefs, shared attitudes, belief about the organization’s history that makes the difference in the culture and creates Employee Engagement, and almost all of this comes down to EQ, emotional intelligence, which, fortunately, unlike IQ, is pretty static after we get into our adult lives. EQ is quite learnable; we can teach all kinds of things, and that’s a big part of what my business does is teaching people about how to be emotionally intelligent, and the data from a variety of studies is fascinating. People who have an emotionally intelligent leader, a high IQ leader, are 400 percent less likely to leave their place of employment, even in weird and very specific categories, and this is some of my past again, um, it has a huge difference in making a place safer so that we just with one day’s training of EQ for supervisors can drive as much in one study as a 50% reduction in time lost injuries. And even from a profit perspective, companies that invest in EQ have a big rate of additional profit growth per year relative organizations that don’t make that investment in teaching EQ. And so there’s all these very, very clear-cut ways that we can prove EQ is the investment to make your Workforce loyal, committed, and your best Salesforce for getting new recruits. And of course, there’s so much more we could say about EQ in this video, but to keep it short, I’ll say one of the most important ingredients and kind of fundamental aspects of having high EQ is self-awareness. If a leader doesn’t know what’s going on inside them, well, not only can they not be emotionally regulated themselves, but they probably can’t be empathic because they’re not actually aware of the emotions that they’re seeing in people around them. So many ways to grow self-awareness, but maybe the number one way is to have a mindfulness practice, and perhaps David will put a link or two to other talks we’ve done in the past about mindfulness and practices we can do to grow that capacity in our own lives. I hope this content is helpful. Bye from Indianapolis. If you like the content, click the share button, press like, all those things, and we’ll see you again next week. Bye for now.