Employee engagement has long been the holy grail for executives, but a new report from Deloitte reveals a widespread failure to move the needle when it comes to this elusive metric or its close cousin, passion.
Despite an estimated $1 billion corporate expenditure in employee engagement in 2017, the study found 68 % of workers are not engaged and 87 % don’t feel passionate about their jobs. Perhaps even more alarming, 49 % of C-suite executives, 51 % of senior management and 63 % of middle management say they are neither passionate nor engaged.
Related article: How to Ensure Your Employees Feel Appreciated
Extreme concern
According to John Hagel, managing director of Deloitte Services, CEOs should be extremely concerned about those findings, particularly as they pertain to the upper ranks. The leaders of the company are role models for the rest of the organization. It’s one thing to give a speech as an executive and say, ‘We all need to be more engaged in our work,’ but in my daily life if I’m not demonstrating that engagement myself, those words are going to be dismissed.
All too often, executives simply assume high levels of engagement come automatically to those in the senior ranks. I don’t think there’s any evidence that the longer you are in your career or the higher up the ladder you go, the more engaged you get.
Lack of involvement
Organizations tend to forget that managers, directors and members of the C-suite are employees too, and thus are impacted by the same factors that cause rank-and-file employees to suffer from low levels of engagement. According to the Deloitte study, these include lack of autonomy, inability to work across teams and a lack of involvement in decision-making. While it may be hard to fathom that a senior executive would be afflicted with the same engagement killers as the rest of the workforce, no level is totally immune.
Extra pressure
While employees and executives share many of the same challenges, the upper echelon is plagued by an additional slate of pressures unique to their position, which contribute to a lack of engagement and passion. Globalization, automation, and political and economic uncertainty have only made the situation worse, says Jones, as executives find themselves besieged by a growing list of stressors that keep them awake at night.
That kind of mounting pressure may create a constant fear of being replaced and prompt an executive to question whether they even like their job anymore, says Hagel. That’s where organizations would benefit from shifting their focus from engagement to passion, he says.
Specific passion
According to the Deloitte study, organizations that experience sustained extreme performance improvement are those in which a specific form of passion is present amongst the workforce. These passionate workers generally exhibit a long-term commitment to making a significant impact in a domain, a questing disposition that actively seeks out new challenges and a connecting disposition that seeks to build trust-based relationships with others who can help them get to a better answer.
Deloitte’s findings suggest employers might be too narrowly focused on employee engagement, rather than developing a workforce with the necessary passion to solve complex challenges and pursue new opportunities during this period of rapid technological change.
Starts at the top
Building a passionate workforce starts at the top. By cultivating passion in the senior ranks, an organization creates a leadership team with the ability to drive increasing performance improvement over time. What’s more, that passion will likely spread to the rest of the workforce as they see it exhibited in the behaviour of senior leadership on a daily basis.
Ultimately, passion is what companies are going to need to be successful going forward. Thrive Change Management can help you build more passion in the workforce by rethinking the work environment in ways that encourage people to be more welcoming of challenges and problems and give them the tools to solve the problems as they encounter them. Contact us for more information or email: jake@thrive-cm.com.
First published on: http://www.hreonline.com/
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