Here is a brief but remarkably insightful article by Jim Clifton for LinkedIn Pulse. To check out a wealth of other valuable resources, please click here.
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Just about anything good that happens to a company, or a country, comes from engaged employees — and there are pitifully few of them around the globe. Engaged employees are committed to their work and their employers. Most importantly, they create the best customers, which drives growth in all of the millions of businesses big and small.
Here’s the problem: Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, conducted in 142 countries, finds that only 13% of employees worldwide are truly engaged in their jobs. The report couldn’t be more alarming — nor a worse report card for global workplace leadership. It calls into question the very practice of management.
And the report has more bad news: 63% of employees worldwide are not engaged in their jobs. They don’t hate their jobs, and aren’t necessarily negative — they’re just there. And an additional 24% are actively disengaged — they’re not only negative and miserable, but they come to work and spread their misery up and down the halls. Our report says that active disengagement is an immense drain on entire economies, even highly developed ones. Gallup estimates that active disengagement costs the U.S. alone more than half a trillion dollars per year.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
One of Gallup’s biggest findings ever has been that the success or failure of an enterprise is primarily determined by whom you name manager. If millions of businesses around the globe started to name the right people manager tomorrow, and ensured that those managers encouraged employees’ development and focused on their strengths, engagement worldwide would skyrocket.
Just imagine if the percentage of engaged employees doubled to 26%. Think of the huge economic gains that would follow. I firmly believe that if we doubled engagement around the globe in the next five years, human conditions would improve far more from that effort than from any humanitarian aid, diplomatic initiatives, or military interventions.
Nothing would change the world — and make it safer and more prosperous — than having twice as many employees achieve the great dream of all of the world’s citizens: to have a good job. Not just a job. Not just mere satisfaction in a job. But a job where a person feels an important sense of mission or purpose — that what they do has meaning, so that their life matters.
If you don’t fully appreciate the power of good jobs, or their impact on global prosperity and peace, think back a couple of years. When Tunisian food vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the government took his food cart — his very livelihood — thus igniting the Arab Spring, did he yell “Death to America” or “Allahu akbar”? Neither. He cried out, “I just want to work!”
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Jim Clifton is Chairman and CEO of Gallup. He is author of The Coming Jobs War (Gallup Press, 2011).