Employee Engagement is Barely Moving. What You Can Do to Buck Trend

Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report is the “go-to” body of data that tells companies how they are doing with employee engagement. In 2012 the survey results looked like this:

31 percent of employees actively engaged in the workplace.
51 percent not engaged.
18 percent actively disengaged.

Fast forward five years and drum roll please… virtually nothing has changed:

33 percent of employees are actively engaged in the workplace.
51 percent are not engaged.
16 percent are actively disengaged.

My conclusion? The world – not just the U.S. – is in a global employee disengagement crisis. Unless leaders do something dramatically different, we will be looking at the same numbers five years from now.

What does dramatically different look like? If you take into consideration the fact that 50% of all workers in 2020 will be millennials, this generation is a good place to start. As I discussed in my May 24 blog, millennials want flexible working hours, the option to work remotely, fast technology, and an open company culture.

WHAT CAN I DO? Provide these simple things and I promise the 2022 Gallup data won’t look the same. Simple you might ask? Yes simple. Employee engagement is not difficult. Meet your employee’s basic human needs and they will be engaged. Allow people to set their work hours (within reason) and work from wherever they want, speed up your network and mobile-optimize your intranet/apps, and be open and honest with people. And if you want to take it a step further, have great training and development options, recognize often, and hire people who are a strong Values match for your organization. These actions are a small price to pay to retain your talent and solidify your future.

Jill Christensen is an employee engagement expert, best-selling author, and international keynote speaker. She is a Top 100 Global Employee Engagement Influencer, authored the best-selling book, If Not You, Who?, and works with the best and brightest global leaders to improve productivity and retention, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth. Jill can be reached at +1.303.999.9224 or jillspeaker@outlook.com.