UK Bottoms Out on Employee Engagement
- Kathy Ratcliffe
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
The UK is close to the bottom of the pile on workplace welfare and employee engagement according to the latest Gallup poll, ranking 34th of 40 countries.
As this summary attests, the outcomes are expensive. Staff churn is minimal where the culture is engaged - where the culture is toxic, people will leave soon after joining.
In this day and age, it's not productive to view people as 'low-hanging fruit' or disposable collateral. Leaders might have got away with that 100 years ago in the wake of the slave trade, but this kind of paradigm has outgrown any kind of usefulness in company management systems.
Skilled employees retiring don't necessarily want to do nothing with their lives. If you asked them to come in and give mentorship to young interns, they'd probably jump at the chance. It would be disrespectful not to reward them, and counter-productive also, but people are more interested in achieving sense of purpose than they are in making millions these days.
AI wants to 'boost morale and retention in your specific business' but it's hard to see how a lot of metrics and advisories is going to help leaders break confirmation bias and responsibility resistance. In my experience, methods like these have usually been tried before and each time they fail, distrust grows a little more. Each time an innovation hits the dust, morale sinks a little lower. Eventually the management team are either busily clutching at straws or giving up entirely, when the solutions are there - the potential is still present in the employee matrix - but the will to bring in a third party is all but absent, in all probability due in part at least to embarrassment.
Failure to embed engagement is nobody's fault, it's human nature to take the path of least resistance and in our universe we tend towards the negative. The longer a peeve or gripe is left alone, the more opportunity it has to swell and burst into the collective. Engagement means listening to people and either acting on their griefs or reassuring them of growth, allowing them to learn how to deal with situations and become more effective people. This involves person-to-person communication, training and coaching that's tailored to need, and collaborative upskilling to advance company performance.
This article from ITN Business is as relevant today as it was two years ago...
so if you'd like to make a start on turning the tide in your favour, visit this page:
Whatever you do, make sure you do something positive this year, and take advantage of what's here in this website.
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