How can your business win when most of your employees are distracted and not engaged?

According to a Gallup poll, employee engagement globally was about 20% in 2020 with the United States engagement at 36% for the first half of 2021. Somewhere between 64-80% of your employees are distracted or not fully engaged at work. Imagine watching a soccer team where only 2 or 3 players were engaged and the rest were distracted.

In our last article, we said that “business agility is measured by the how quickly and effectively your business can respond to an opportunity or threat.” Distracted employees are like a distracted child standing on the soccer field. By the time they see the ball, it is too late. You need employees that are engaged and empowered to act when the ball comes to them.

What causes 94% of employees to disengage?

Research of 28,000 employees in 15 countries revealed that when organizations do not implement change well a whopping 94% of employees reported being disengaged.

3 Reasons people do not respond well to change.

Empower People with Knowledge

Before you implement change, you must overcome people’s fear of the unknown. Knowledge is power. Insecure leaders hoard knowledge for themselves, so they can feel more powerful. Failing to share knowledge with employees is failing to empower your employees. The result is people feel afraid and insecure.

Fear of the unknown creates stress. A CareerBuilder’s survey found 31% of respondents reported extremely high levels of stress. Fight or flight are common reactions to stress. Both these reactions are counterproductive in the work environment. Most employees are not going to fight with their manager; instead, they are going to flee the situation. That translates into avoiding or being disengaged at work due to stress.

Instead of holding information back, leaders need to trust their employees and share knowledge with them. By giving people knowledge, you give them power. Additionally, you reduce the unknown and the fear that comes from not knowing. Not only does this reduce stress, but also gives people the knowledge and power to be engaged.

Give People Control

People often resist change when it is forced on them, especially when it feels like they are losing control. When a parent forces a child onto the soccer field, quite often that same child is the one disengaged watching the ball go by them. 

Servant leaders can often motivate people to do things they may not want to do by taking a softer approach that respects the person. Likewise, influential leaders don’t rely on authority. Instead of telling people your solution and what you want them to do, try asking them to solve the problem. Quite often you can lead a person to the same result by asking questions.

People will often be more receptive to change when they have been engaged in the process and feel like they had input into the solution.

Empower People with Purpose

If people do not understand the reason for change, then they perceive their time is being wasted on something of no value. And when people feel their time is being wasted, they disengage.

Very few leaders implement change for no reason. The problem is a failure to communicate the purpose in a manner that people understand. These three principles can help clarify your reason for change.

Your employees need to understand why you are implementing change. They need to understand the purpose and expected value of the change.

Challenge People with Opportunities

Agile companies need high performing employees that thrive on challenges. High performing employees often seek challenges that stretch them and provide opportunities for personal growth. A Korn Ferry survey of 4,900 professionals discovered that 33% quit their job because they were bored and desired a challenge.

Gary Burnison, CEO at Korn Ferry, told Forbes that the number one predictor of success is learning agility. Successful individuals use curiosity and learning agility to figure out what to do even when they don’t know what to do. Likewise, Google’s former Chief HRO, Laszlo Block, agreed that learning agility is key. He tells people that Google viewed learning agility as the leading predictor of success, leaving factors like intelligence and education far behind.

Life-long learner, learning agility, critical thinking, street smart, or whatever label you want to put on it, the idea is basically the same. We need people who are committed to learning and who desire challenges as an opportunity to expand their minds. These innovative thinkers are key to building an agile organization that responds quickly to threats and opportunities.

“There is a cultural change behind agility” - Felix Hieronymi

Create an Agile Culture that Empowers People

According to a Forbes survey of 506 senior executives across the globe, 92 percent believed that organization agility was critical to business success. But only 27 percent of the executives considered themselves highly agile. The same research identified that the biggest hurdle to achieving agility was the culture of the company.

Changing the culture of any company is a big task. Many employees join and stay at a company because they agree with the culture. When you start changing the culture of a company, you risk creating fear of the unknown as your culture shifts. If you force the decision, then you take away control, which causes more problems.

“Culture is definitely the biggest aspect of making an environment more agile or flexible.” Chris Stone-Stecklein

The Senior Director of International Strategy at Walmart, Chris Stone-Stecklein, shared 4 steps to ease the transition into an agile culture.

  1. Start Small
  2. Teach Your Leaders
  3. Set Expectations
  4. Invest in Training

There is no set path that will work for every company. Each company has their own unique culture, which needs to preserve some elements while adopting more agile methods. An Agile Master can help guide companies through their transformation journey.

Hanna Fager, Senior Vice President of Human Resources for Volvo Car Group, describes the key to building an agile culture as…

Leadership that is not driven by hierarchy, but by contributing and achieving something together as a team. In the case of Volvo, this required employees to abandon their “very traditional, dot-the-solid-line, who-do-I-report-to, who-is-my-manager” mentality for one in which team members “take common ownership” of smaller and more nimble projects.

Developing an Engaged and Agile Mindset

The agility of your business will be determined by the level of employee engagement and how agile your people think. If they are distracted and not engaged, they will be slow to respond. However, if you can empower and motivate your employees to get engaged and to think with agility, then you have created a winning mindset in your people.

A winning mindset does not guarantee they are going to win every time. In the beginning, they are going to make lots of mistakes. They need your permission to fail. And they need your encouragement to learn from those failures. As you form new agile teams across your organization, they will go through the stages of team building. You must go through storming and norming before you get to performing.

Developing an agile mindset across your organization will take time. You will endure some storms and challenges along the way. One of the keys to successfully navigating through this transition is having a simple strategy to guide your people.

For more information about empowering teams or developing a strategy to transform your organization, please contact Alliance Advisors