That’s Right – 67% Of Employees Are Disengaged At Work
And that’s just in the U.S, where people get coffee breaks and are paid more than two dollars an hour. It’s even worse if we look at the broader world where those things aren’t guaranteed, factories can pay a handful of dollars with inhumane conditions and employees are not protected by basic laws.
But having 67% of your employees be disengaged is still pretty bad. After all, disengaged employees are the ones who are more likely to leave, more likely to be sick on average, and even (according to the research) more likely to steal.
But there’s more, and it is discovered and outlined in the book, “The Lean CX Score” by David McLachlan. In the Lean CX Score, David outlines the benefits of designing your work, and your products, properly. And they all point to improved engagement and improved profit as a result.
For a start, disengaged team members or employees are six times more likely to leave their job than their engaged counterparts. That’s a 600% difference. Do you think it’s expensive to acquire customers? Well it’s extremely expensive to find and hire good staff. Between the downtime caused with a lost employee, to the cost of advertising, vetting resumes, interviewing, and training, it is much easier to keep them engaged in the first place.
Engaged team members are also more likely to make you more money. A study by Kenexa found that businesses with highly engaged employees – those in the top quartile of engagement – achieved twice the annual net revenue on average, when compared to businesses with lower engagement scores.
It’s for these reasons that there are entire companies dedicated to the discovery of employee engagement around the world, and companies are lining up to buy their services. Engagement matters.
But You Don’t Have To Suffer Through Low Engagement
If you’d prefer to live in the higher engagement end of town, there is good news. You don’t have to suffer through low engagement scores, as a business owner, a leader managing a team, or a “leader without a title” inside a team of your own where you feel engagement could be higher.
Designing your work for happiness has been proven to have a huge effect on your employees, and it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Take just two steps in the Lean CX Score book – a Repeatable Process, and Checking In.
In 1961, a US psychologist called Mihaly Csikszentmihali interviewed 1000 peole, asking them about the circumstances that made them happy. He called this happiness a state of “Flow”, when things went well, and things just seemed to flow well – when participants felt on top of the world. Mihaly found five main things in common when it came to creating happiness. It happened when his subjects were:
- Intensely focused on an activity,
- Had control over the outcome,
- That was neither too easy not too hard,
- That had a clear objective, and;
- That gave immediate feedback
The good news about this is having a Repeatable Process, whether it’s interacting with a product in a predictable way each time, or knowing the boundaries of your work so you can easily move into a flow state, has a deep impact on happiness and flow.
And Checking In, which is step five in the Lean CX Score, means we check regularly to see if we’re on track – with our customers, our users, or our team.
There are many more stories and a lot more research in the Lean CX Score book, making it a nice, easy read that will have a huge impact on your results.
I highly recommend you get yourself a copy today.
Get "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition. Oh and good news! You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time. Get the Lean CX Score now.