Global employee engagement levels are shockingly low

Here's a recent survey listing the percentage of employees who are engaged by their work:

Japan - 5%

Italy - 5%

France - 7%

UK - 10%

Spain - 10%

Switzerland - 11%

South Korea - 12%

Finland - 14%

Turkey - 14%

Germany - 16%

China - 18%

Portugal - 19%

Australia - 20%

Canada - 21%

Brazil - 28%

US - 32%

Mongolia - 38%

Global Average: 23%.

I’m no mathematician, but this says 3 in 4 people either aren’t engaged in their work or are ACTIVELY disengaged.

This is bananas.

The study was done by Gallup, using 12 metrics to measure employee engagement over the past 3 years.

They define employee engagement as:

“the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in both their work and workplace. Highly engaged teams outperform the rest in business outcomes critical to the success of your organization.”

Best practice organizations average 72% of employees as being engaged… 3x the global average, and more than 5% a lot of countries’ average.

Given this topic should be high on the agenda for a lot of companies, here are 3 ideas you may like to try:

1. Does your org have values or some kind of mission / vision? You do? Create initiatives that actually bring them to life for employees vs. burying them in a slide deck somewhere.

2. Hollywood may be on strike, but the model isn’t: give small teams more agency to incubate new projects.

3. You already have your own Creator Economy: provide employees with tools, skills and bandwidth to produce content, tell stories, and bring co-workers and customers further inside the company’s world.

I can’t say if all these will work for every company, but when 70%, 80%, 90% of your employees don’t really care… something's up.

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