I’m a bit late on this one, but take a few minutes to read through this jaw-dropping report from Gallup in the US. It’s an overall review of the state of the workforce in the US in 2013.
70% of the American workforce is either “Not Engaged” or “Actively Disengaged” from their workplace. This means they don’t feel any connection to the company they work for, and are either just punching the clock and doing bare minimum or actively disrupting operations as a result of their unhappiness. WOW.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics say labor force participation in the US is 62.8%. There are 313 million people in the US, so 62.8% of that is 197 million folks who are working. The 70% that are “Not Engaged” or “Actively Disengaged” is 137 million. So 137 million people in the US are mediocre performers, sleepwalking through their job or working to undermine productivity in their workplace.
Said another way, there are only 60 million people in the US who are actively engaged in their job, passionately driving for results.
Engagement is tricky business. It doesn’t mean free junk food or a foosball table in the break room. It means your employees are connected to the company vision, and are passionate about driving results. Engaging your staff is high management art based on providing teams with a vision they believe in and the autonomy to drive results – along with a clear understanding of metrics used to measure said results. I’ve washed myself up on the rocky shore of engagement a few times, it gets tremendously complicated the larger the team you manage is. When you have a team that is passionate about what they do, believing in the message – it is powerful!
The interesting conversation here is the macro level view. What is the future of the US economy, if 7/10 folks in the US are not all that interested in achieving much of anything? What does that mean for partners like Canada? What opportunity does this represent?
Categories: Enterprise
Chris Saunders
I am a Sr. Cloud Solutions Architect for Red Hat.
email chrisb@redhat.com
twitter @canadianchris
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