- Will your organisation soar to new heights, or will your people take flight?
- Hybrid working and why employee engagement matters more than ever
If your employee engagement scores have followed the global trend, there’s a very good chance they took a tumble during the pandemic and have failed to fully bounce back.
The scale of change the year covid broke made the drop in engagement understandable, but nearly three years on?
Employee Engagement’s new challenge
Last year should have been one of celebratory reconnection, yet for many it revealed itself to be one of disconnection; the alarming numbers dropping out the workforce, the great resignation, quiet quitting, and global engagement scores skulking at 21%.
“The great resignation is clear evidence of a terrible business failing. Drive up employee engagement and you help improve recruitment, retention, & resilience.”
– Chris Carey, Axiom’s Managing Director
How leaders show up has always shone a bright light which cast long shadows within an organisation, and employee engagement is indicative of how they show up.
There’s been a fundamental shift in our ways of working. But has there been a corresponding shift that helps leaders engage those hybrid teams? A stagnant 79% low engagement figure suggests not.
So, the real question becomes whether organisations can afford the toll this continued disengagement is taking on wellbeing, productivity and profitability.
The cost of disengagement
We could offer a figure here about how much disengagement costs global business, but who really cares? What matters most is what it costs your own organisation.
A more meaningful (albeit crude) way to think about the financial impact is to look at last year’s profit figure and engagement score. That’s how much your organisation made last year with that percentage of fully engaged employees.
Now re-calculate what the profit uplift would be if you shifted your employee engagement dial a few percentage points. And dare to dream, imagine if instead of hovering around 80% disengagement, you had 80% engagement!
No matter how you look at it, 80% is a lot of salary spend for those not delivering – and that’s if they stay. Dissatisfied people tend to leave, which is what we’ve been seeing most recently with the great resignation.
- The cost of using productive time to look for other opportunities, rather than the work they are paid to deliver.
- The cost of recruiting.
- The cost on the remaining team caused by the gap.
- The cost of getting a new hire up to speed.
- The cost of doing all the above… again and again.
The costs are endless, yet disengagement is determined primarily by one thing…
… the boss.
According to Gallup (the organisation that carries out the world’s largest employee experience survey), a manager’s effect on the workforce is so significant that they claim to be able to predict 70% of the variance in team engagement just by getting to know the boss.
It is why Axiom has spent over 25 years finding practical (and proven) ways to help business leaders increase employee engagement – wherever they are on that journey, or their team located.
A leader’s impact on engagement was true pre-pandemic; what’s changed are our ways of working. The change suggests that before employee engagement can improve, we must help leaders engage and re-engage their people in this hybrid world of work.
What makes hybrid working more challenging to engaging employees?
In short: A failure to connect.
Most of us thrive on human contact but hybrid working significantly reduces that.
We dial in to meetings that too often lack any social connectedness from the outset, at a time we need it most. We’re still hanging on covid’s coat tails, experiencing a rise in the cost of living, and continuing to witness the ongoing war in Ukraine with all its fallout.
Social connectedness was less of a problem pre-pandemic when it was ‘office as usual’. During the day we’d grab a coffee with colleagues or after work perhaps something stronger, but now even when we’re in the office many are missing.
It’s not just the banter we’re missing either. It’s the sense of being part of something bigger, of being part of a stable community and being party to the feeling that, ‘we’re all in this together’.
And when we’re at home, one day looks much like another. It’s too easy to become siloed and task focused. As Simon Sinek would no doubt attest, we’re so focused on the ‘what’ and ‘how’, we’re forgetting to connect people to the ‘why’.
Those leading hybrid teams and diving straight into the content are failing to connect, which is often when engagement fails.
There is simply no effective collaboration without first establishing an effective connection. It’s like getting Microsoft Teams to work without a reliable internet connection.
Three tiny but telling traits of disengaged hybrid workers
Camera shy… really?
There are multiple reasons people don’t turn their cameras on, but how many are actually reasonable? Would you accept folk turning up for a face-to-face meeting, then hide their face behind their notebook or tablet? If you’re regularly looking into an abyss during virtual meetings, it likely indicates disengagement.
Looking away at their second monitor… honestly?
If people are looking away from the screen for prolonged periods and failing to make virtual eye contact, there’s a good chance they’re doing something else. Multi-screening, multi-tasking, staring out of the window, call it what you will – what you can’t call it is fully engaged.
Truly contributing… or coasting?
Not everyone’s keen to speak up via their mic’ and camera, so use the chat facility to make it easier for everyone to contribute to a virtual meeting. If yours is a one-way broadcast, greeted by deafening silence, it often signifies disengagement, perhaps even stemming from a lack of Psychological Safety – a prerequisite to engagement.
The benefits of effectively engaging hybrid teams
There are thousands of published articles setting out how engaged teams are happier, how absence and attrition falls, how productivity and promoter scores increase. All of this holds true when engaging hybrid teams.
But against a precarious macro-economic outlook, where hybrid working makes employee engagement harder, the biggest benefit is simply that it remains one of the best predictors of your organisation’s success for the year ahead.
“2023 may turn out to be tough. But it’ll be tougher still for those who fail to engage the colleagues they need to succeed. Try delivering success without your people and see how you do.”
– Chris Carey, Axiom’s Managing Director
So, if you or your leaders would like an experienced hand engaging your colleagues, wherever they work, we’d love to chat to you.
Axiom has been partnering leading businesses to improve their employee engagement and business performance for more than 25 years.
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