Employee Engagement: What Does Your Crew Look Like?

• Posted on February 24, 2016
• by Lisa Sperow
• in Employee Engagement
• No Comments.

Employee engagement levels have been hanging around the 33% mark for a long time now. Gallup just released their latest numbers, indicating that the current level of engaged employees in the U.S workforce, as of January 2016, is around 32.5%. And no one considers that “news” because engagement levels have been hovering around that mark for years now.

Yuck.

I don’t like to overuse this word, but I find that statistic unacceptable.

Luckily, I’m not the only one.

According to Deloitte’s 2015 Global Human Capital Trends report, other HR and business leaders do too. They ranked employee engagement as their #1 challenge last year, and 66% indicated that plans for 2016 included updating their engagement and retention strategies as a result.

Why is employee engagement such a big deal?

I could throw lots of statistics at you to make my point, but instead I’m going to let Bob Kelleher, employee engagement expert, explain it with a great little story that he uses about a crew team:

Imagine if you are on a crew team, and you are in front, paddling like crazy. You turn around, and you notice two of your crew mates are also paddling like crazy, and you conclude that while there are 10 of us, only three seem to be giving it their all. Then you casually look behind, and you see that five of your colleagues are looking at the scenery, and looking at life pass them by. But worse, you notice two of them are actually trying to sink your crew boat. They are adding water to the back. And you sit there and say, “Boy, can we possibly win with that as our crew team?” or, according to Gallup, “with that as your workforce?”

Exactly, right?

How can you possibly win when you’re dealing with not only that kind of apathy but also that kind of sabotage on your team? In your company?

How can you possibly keep customer satisfaction levels high with a crew like that?

How can you possibly achieve high levels of productivity and profitability with a crew like that?

And how long can you possibly expect those employees who are “paddling like crazy” to stick around with a crew like that?

I love this visual because it helps paint such a great picture of what employee engagement really looks like in the typical organization.

I don’t like this visual if it represents what employee engagement looks like in your organization.

So… what does your crew look like?