An important piece of research in our work at SparkWorks is Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace Report.  Gallup is a leading researcher on employee engagement and their research gives an in-depth understanding of employee engagement in regions around the world, now expanded to include other, albeit related, aspects of engagement such as stress and well being.

The 2024 report was recently released and doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

Only 23% of the world’s employees are engaged with US and Canada leading at 33%. One might look at that result and think that result is satisfactory however, we’d argue that it’s nowhere near good enough.

Consider the experience, and the impact of the other side of these numbers – the number of employees going to work each day feeling unengaged or even actively disengaged. The typical day for these employees involves feeling discouraged, disconnected, uninterested or contrary. A person typically spends 100,000 hours of their life at work. Do we want to spend that much time feeling lousy, complacent, stressed or angry?

There is a high cost to that for an individual, an organization, and a community.

There are so many good reasons for companies to focus on creating the conditions for high employee engagement. Best practice organizations enjoy significantly better organizational outcomes when their employees are engaged. Absenteeism, turnover, safety incidents, theft, defects go down. Customer loyalty, productivity in sales and production goes up.

When these things happen, the correlation to a productivity increase is easy to see. In fact, the typical productivity increase is 23%!  Employee wellbeing (thriving employees) in these organizations show an increase of 68% and these organizations become better organizational citizens, showing participation increases of 22%.

In short, developing highly engaged teams results in greater success for individuals, organizations, and communities.

One way organizations can turn this around is by taking an honest, in-depth look at the way manager jobs are designed and how their managers are doing.  By effectively focusing on how to make managers more successful, organizations can enjoy a powerful uplift in employee engagement. Why? Because managers influence a team’s engagement by up 70%!

However, when we look at how managers are doing, we see another concerning situation. There’s a strong message from managers that they need help. Only 3 in 10 managers report being engaged, causing managers to report higher and more frequent experiences of negative emotions such as stress, anger, or loneliness. How can managers coach, support, and inspire their teams if they themselves are struggling?

In organizations that understand and focus on employee engagement, 7 in 10 managers are engaged. When managers are engaged, their teams are more likely to be engaged too. In these teams, managers involve their teams in setting goals, provide regular, useful feedback that enables performance and development and foster accountability in heathy and respectful ways. However, jobs must be designed to allow managers the time to do this and their skills must be developed to help them carry out such people leadership tasks effectively.

We need a paradigm shift that recognizes how critical manager role is. Managers must be more highly valued than they are today. The future of work is here now and an organization’s future success will be significantly influenced by the effectiveness and engagement of their managers.

We also need a paradigm shift that recognizes engagement is much more than a nice to have – it is a sound business strategy.

And the payoff is there! Both the research and experiences of best practice organizations tell us that better outcomes are possible and the efforts are worthwhile.

What’s the downside of working on employee engagement? We’re hard pressed to find one.