Big trends: Is engagement a buzzword or something real?

I’ve been reading this year's crop of trends and forecasts related to team performance. I like to go back a few years as well to see how past analysis and predictions stand up.  

There is one set of numbers that keeps coming back for the last few years - each time a little louder.

This year, even the likes of the Harvard Business Review, MIT’s Sloan School of Business and the big consulting firms are all leaning into this one set of data around this one concept:

Engagement 

Specifically, engagement as measured in Gallup's State of the Workplace report. 

Demystifying something simple.

Engagement is a measure of the care and effort people bring to work.  It matters because when we aren’t engaged as people - when we just show up at work and do just enough to keep our jobs, (i.e. we are not engaged) - we avoid all the stuff that drives high performance.  We don’t see ways to improve or act on ideas. We don’t embrace change. There’s a longer list, but you get the picture.

The engaged team members, on the other hand, do things at 2x -  they are 2x as profitable, 2x as productive, etc.  

Put another way, people who aren’t engaged are going at half speed.

The numbers 

It’s easiest to see this in terms of a team of smiley faces.  Imagine that you get to put together a team of 10 people from anywhere in the working population.   

What you are going to find: 

8 out of 10 on your team are, at best, disengaged.  Those are the people working at half speed.

That means only 2 out of 10 are engaged and showing up at their best. 

In my experience, those engaged people are carrying everyone else.  Does this sound familiar?

Even worse is...

There are essentially 2 of 10  people working against you.  

More specifically, one working against you every day, and one working against you most days.  

The way that engagement is typically handled is as some kind of HR compliance initiative.  While those things are well-intentioned, too often they get in the way of getting things done - and after all, engagement is about helping everyone realize the results they need faster.

We’ve found a simple, direct set of practices that help you hit your numbers and goals faster by driving real-world engagement.