Dive Brief:
- It's fairly obvious that American employers are losing the engagement war, according to Mark Crowley, a consultant who works with business leaders.
- Writing in LinkedIn Pulse, Crowley referred to the June 2013's release of the Gallup State of The American Workplace study, which revealed only 30% of the nation's workers were fully engaged in their jobs.
- In the past two-plus years, Crowley writes, employers have tried all sorts of engagment-building initiatives, "all with the goal of upending apathy, discontent – and the low discretionary effort too often displayed by their rank and file employees."
Dive Insight:
According to Gallup, Crowley notes, those efforts have fallen flat, as growth in engagement has remained relatively the same for most of 2015 (it's at 32% today).
To understand the stagnantion, Crowley asked Gallup's resident engagement expert, Jim Harter, to explain some of the reasons why engagement is such a tough nut to crack. One big reason: many employers have fooled themselves into thinking they have made progress because internal metrics say they have. Crowley also asked if Gallup would put out a challenge for 2016.
Harter said that assuming employers actually adopt many of the practices known to greatly improve engagement (they do exist, because Gallup has had much success helping employers on that front), they could hit 40% engagement by next December. "And if we get there, we’d all have a tremendous achievement to celebrate, not to mention some great organizational success that will undoubtedly come with it," he told Crowley.
