The Business Case for Employee Management

So you’ve had a chance to assess your own team, reflect on the behaviors you’re seeing in your team, and share with your fellow classmates the observations. That are leading you to conclude who’s engaged, who’s not engaged, who’s actively disengaged. And hopefully, you’re seeing some common themes. Now, I wanna shift and talk about why that matters, why does it matter for you? Many organizations today are becoming less domestic and more global. We all know that. The data on engagement is pretty striking when we start to break it down in terms of the global regions around the world. The data that I’m sharing with you here breaks it down by region.

So remember on average, a little over 10% around 13% engaged, a little over 60% not engaged almost a quarter of individuals actively disengaged, when we look at the entire globe. But there are some striking differences across regions. And if you’re in an organization that is becoming less domestic and expanding globally whether you’re based in China, the US, Europe, South America, Africa wherever you’re based you need to understand the different levels of motivation and engagement around the world. Because it’s likely that you’re gonna be operating at some point in your career in a global team where you’re having to participate as a team member or possibly manage people who are from all different parts of the world.

And so what you see here is the data separated out by region where for example, in the United States and Canada, you’ve got north of around 29% of people ratings that they’re engaged and only 18% actively disengaged. But then you go to East Asia for example, at the bottom of this graph. Where only 6% of people are assessing themselves as engaged and 26% actively disengaged. Middle East North Africa, North of 30%, 35% actually rating themselves as actually disengaged at work. And so as you think about global teams operating in a global landscape these data become particularly important.

More as a litmus test for the challenges, the motivation challenges that you’re going to have to deal with as you begin to manage more globally. And why is that important? The data here from the same Gallup October 2013 survey talks about the effect of this engagement motivation on outcomes that we, as organizations, as teams, we care a lot about. Whether it be profitability, productivity or turnover in this case meaning attrition, employees voluntarily leaving the organization or absenteeism which may even be worst, the employees remaining in the organization but choosing not to show up at work. What you see here, are the differences between organizations that rated on the engagement survey done by Galup, in the top quartile, versus the bottom-quartile.

So the top quartile of organization on average had north of 20% greater profitability than the organizations that rated in the bottom quartile on engagement. Similarly on customer service for example 10 to 15% greater than for the top quartile. Relative to firms and organizations in the bottom quartile. But then you look at some of these other components, patient safety incidents for example. So if you’re in health care or want to go into health care, the organizations that rated in the top quartile on this engagement motivation survey actually had 40% less Patient Safety Incidents in hospitals, health care institutions, relative to the organizations that rated in the bottom-quartile on this motivation and engagement survey.

And so it’s not only important that we understand what’s driving people’s motivation and their engagement. But it’s also important because the business case suggests that this level of motivation and engagement really matters for outcomes that we as organizations, managers, team members, that we really care about. And it’s our responsibility as organizational members to do what we can to help improve the motivation and engagement in the organization. So that we can drive these outcomes that not only benefit the organization, but all of its various stakeholders from customers to shareholders and otherwise. So hopefully these data drive home the importance of what we’re talking about this week. The motivation engagement.

And now, what we’re gonna do is turn to what are the strategies that we can use whether we’re team members or managers to really enhance, drive those motivations for performance? So that people are performing above and beyond what anyone might expect.