And Gallup keeps reminding us of one unshakable truth: Managers are the single biggest factor in employee engagement.

Gallup’s Data Speaks—And It’s Loud

A few data points worth revisiting (or maybe hearing with fresh ears):

• Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement.
• Two-thirds of employees whose managers focus on their strengths are engaged.
• One in two employees has left a job just to get away from their manager.

Let that settle. We keep spending millions on engagement strategies, yet half of our people are walking out the door because of their direct supervisor.

——

Further Reading: Who Drives Retention Success? Gallup Says Your Team Leaders

——-

The Manager Math Still Doesn’t Add Up

Gallup’s deeper dive into management ability is even more sobering:

• Only 1 in 10 people naturally possesses the talent to manage others.
• That means, statistically, only 10% of employees report to someone well-suited to lead.

When you consider that many large organizations have one manager per 10 employees, the conclusion is hard to ignore: Just 1 out of every 10 employees works for a manager truly built for the job.

And Gallup doesn’t mince words:

“Bad managers cost businesses billions of dollars each year… and nothing fixes that—except making better decisions about who manages.”

Why Engagement Efforts Keep Failing

So, what are most companies doing instead? You know the list:

• Recognition: Employee of the Month, cake in the breakroom, company clock at 10 years.
• Communication: CEO video updates, annual town halls.
• Career Development: Career Day, a guest speaker from the local community college.

These initiatives aren’t inherently wrong—but they’re not moving the needle. Deloitte reports that U.S. companies now spend $1.5 billion per year on engagement strategies, yet average engagement levels haven’t budged in 20 years.

Roughly one-third of employees were engaged in 2000. It’s the same today. Why?
Because recognition, communication, and coaching only matter if they come from the boss.

——

Further Reading: Gallup’s Post-Pandemic “Best Friend” Turnover Solution

——-

Engagement Is Local—and It’s Built on Trust

We’ve bought into a myth that corporate-led programs can replace what only a frontline manager can provide: genuine connection, consistent coaching, and real-time recognition.

But there’s no shortcut around this:

Employees engage when their manager engages.
Employees stay when their manager builds trust.

That’s why we developed Stay Interviews—to give managers the tools they need to do exactly that.

Stay Interviews: Training That Actually Sticks

Stay Interviews aren’t conceptual. They’re tactical and immediate.

We train supervisors to ask the right questions, listen deeply, and document what they hear. No lag between training and action. No guessing about what employees care about. Just conversations that build trust—one manager, one employee at a time.

Because at the end of the day, engagement doesn’t live in HR.

It lives in the hands of your leaders.

Want a Practical Way to Start?

If you’re frustrated with low engagement or unsure how to convince senior leaders to invest in manager training that works, let’s talk. Write me directly at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or send a note through LinkedIn. We’ll explore how you can cut turnover and finally move the needle on engagement.

The post The Real Cost of a Bad Boss; Gallup Doesn’t Mince Words appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

• Engaged Employees – Engaged employees work passionately and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.
• Disengaged Employees – Not engaged employees are essentially ‘checked out.’ They’re sleepwalking through their workday, putting time — but not energy or passion — into their work.
• Actively Disengaged Employees – Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

—–

Further reading: Who Jeopardizes Engagement the Most? Gallup Math Says It’s Managers

—–

Gallup’s reporting includes both U.S. and Canadian employees, and here are their results since 2000:

The chart tells us that over a full 24-year period there have been small gains and small losses, but that overall there has been little positive movement at all. And Gallup recently announced that early in 2024 employee engagement had reached an 11-year low.[i]

Gallup attributes this absence of engagement improvement to areas like lack of job clarity, a short supply of manager skills, and survey burnout among other reasons. But here is the real reason:

Firstline managers are hardly if ever held accountable for increasing their employee engagement scores.

I reported this first in 2018 in my book titled How to Raise Your Team’s Employee Engagement Score.

A Gartner report tells us that a full 74% of U.S. companies conduct annual employee surveys[ii]. And what do they do with the data? Here’s a very common process using lack of employee recognition as an example:

1. HR pulls together an employee committee to solve employee recognition.
2. After three meetings the committee presents its report.
3. The top recommendations are to schedule employee of the month, employee of the year, and employee appreciation week…and also provide a backpack for five years of service and a clock for ten.
4. One year later, the employee recognition score is the same or worse.

When employees complain about lack of recognition, the last thing they want to do is watch someone else win an award. And the first thing they want is for their manager to tell them they did a good job.

Manager accountability for engagement is nowhere. I recently asked a crowd of 500 SHRM attendees to raise their hand if they’ve ever known of a manager to be fired for a continual low engagement score. No hands went up.

This process of conduct a survey/wait a month for results/ develop one-size-fits-all programs/re-survey a year later with no improvement is as outdated as suitcases without wheels, the ones we used to carry through airports.

Consider this Gallup quote:

Gallup’s most profound finding — ever — is probably this: 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.[iii]

So the obvious question becomes that if engagement is mostly driven by direct supervisors, why then do we think we can improve engagement with one-size-fits-all programs that do nothing to improve manager/employee relationships? These programs like town hall meetings, career ladders, and better benefits look as though they are designed to work around manager relationships rather than improve them.

—–

Further reading: Best Employee Engagement Gauge: 1-Day Survey or 1-on-1 Conversation?

—–

Why Don’t Companies Focus on First-Line Supervisors to Improve Engagement?

Because they don’t know how. Their best move is to ask managers to submit engagement improvement plans and then never follow up to see if the manager executed their plans. Nor do they have a critical eye to provide feedback to the manager on whether the plan would work, whether it would actually improve engagement. And worse, no one compares managers’ scores from year to year in order to coach or fire those managers who just don’t have the required skills, energy, or interest.

If employee engagement really mattered to executive teams, they would fire a few managers each year who failed to increase their scores over time. These are the same executives who throw around terms like culture, best place to work, and employer of choice, yet they saddle some of their best workers with an ill-equipped supervisor.

The Fix That Works for Engagement

Here’s an easy way to improve engagement that neither Gallup nor any other consultant will tell you:

1. Structure your survey reporting so you get reports with scores as far down the organization chart as possible.
2. After the first administration, provide each of your first-line supervisors with a specific and measurable goal for the next survey administration, and for most companies this is the following year.
3. Train your leaders to conduct Stay Interviews the right way, the way I invented Stay Interviews to be put into place, and ask them to build one-on-one engagement plans with each member of their teams.
4. Then hold them accountable to achieving their goal score.
5. If they miss, ask for details about their Stay Interviews and then coach them…or can them.

This is the cousin to how our client companies improve employee retention consistently by 20% and more.

In-Person Employee Retention Intensive for Leaders

Are you committed to improving employee retention and engagement? Then join us this September in Orlando for two-and-a-half days of intensive training specifically designed for HR leaders who need to cut turnover, improve employee engagement, and decrease recruiting spend in the most cost-effective way. Based on Dick Finnegan’s ground-breaking, our expert facilitators will equip you with all the tools you need to implement your retention strategies to build a thriving, engaged workplace culture. Secure your spot today!

[i] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/647564/employee-engagement-inches-slightly-year-low.aspx

[ii] https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/is-it-time-to-toss-out-your-old-employee-engagement-survey

[iii] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/395210/engage-frontline-managers.aspx#:~:text=business%20success%20soars.-,Gallup’s%20most%20profound%20finding%20%2D%2D%20ever%20%2D%2D%20is%20probably%20this,determined%20solely%20by%20the%20manager.&text=Managers%20are%20the%20difference%20between,retain%20and%20engage%20their%20teams.

The post Why Hasn’t Engagement Improved in 24 Years? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

“Surveys are a pain to complete and, as a result, most people don’t invest much thought in filling them in, which means the information they give is low-quality and unlikely to provide strategic insight. Talking to customers and asking open-ended questions yields better results and in most cases your managers will not need to conduct much more than a dozen such interviews to gain a complete picture of customer needs and preferences.”

So if talking to customers versus surveying them is now deemed as more effective by such a highly-credible source, shouldn’t this same principle be applied to employees as well? The chart below offers a clue.

——
Further Reading: Who Drives Retention Success? Gallup Says Your Team Leaders

——

Raise the Gallup and HBR Research and Findings on Employee Engagement Up a Notch

Gallup began surveying companies regarding their levels of employee engagement in 2000. So they now have 24 years of comparative data to measure how much employee engagement has improved, given that about three-quarters of companies do such a survey and then develop improvement plans after. Here are their results:

Gallup has said publicly that little has changed on the employee engagement front during the past 24 years. There are several reasons for this including…

1. As HBR says, surveys of any kind are taken more seriously by those who interpret them than by those who complete them.
2. Follow-up “action plans” result in little action, especially on the manager side.
3. And HR-driven actions are always one-size-fits-all programs for broad topics like recognition and communication.

But let’s take the HBR finding and raise our research up a notch. Unlike customers who change products for many reasons, we know that the number one reason employees quit jobs…or more importantly stay in jobs…is how much they trust their direct supervisors. And this applies to engagement as well. So when re-reading the three reasons why employee engagement surveys fail, is it any wonder that not only is employee engagement stuck in the mud but also that employee turnover remains the top worry among corporate CEOs?[ii]

——
Further Reading: Who Jeopardizes Engagement the Most? Gallup Math Says It’s Managers

——

The HBR study also points out the importance of asking open-ended questions. When applying these principles to engaging and retaining employees, the stars are aligning that Stay Interviews are an awfully good idea. Here’s a refresher:

1. Managers invite each individual employee to meet, saying “I want to learn what I can do to make working here better for you”.
2. Managers are then trained to ask five specific and heavily-researched open-ended questions.
3. Managers are also trained to listen, probe to learn more, take pages of notes, and develop at least one action they can take to help employees stay longer and engage more.

The part that says “managers are trained” is more complex because managers must develop new skills…and practice those skills. The Stay Interview training that we provide consumes three full hours of skill practice, role-play, and feedback to ensure each manager is comfortable scheduling their initial Stay Interviews the very next day.

——

Further reading: Best Employee Engagement Gauge: 1-Day Survey or 1-on-1 Conversation?

——

Improving Employee Engagement and Retention with Stay Interviews

Stay Interviews versus engagement surveys? That’s an easy one because Stay Interviews…

• Put managers in the solution seat versus HR…or no one.
• Provide data that is always current because these initial conversations become the grist of future discussions resulting in more openness and even better solutions.
• And Stay Interviews provide one-on-one, individualized solutions to improve retention and engagement…versus one-size-fits-all “solutions” that are hardly ever actual solutions.

And here’s one last thought. Research tells us that top performers out-perform average performers by four-to-one. Chew on that for a moment because not only does it tell us that losing a top performer cost four times more to replace…but top performers’ survey data is mixed in with the rest because all inputs are anonymous. Managers, though, readily know who their top performers are and will go to extra steps to keep them…once they know what is required to do so which only Stay Interviews can disclose.

Master Training: Employee Retention Intensive for HR Leaders

Specifically designed for HR leaders who have been charged with reducing turnover and maintaining a stable, skilled workforce. Based on Dick Finnegan’s ground-breaking work with Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow, our expert facilitators will equip you with all the tools you need to refine and implement your retention strategies to build a thriving, engaged workplace culture. Secure your spot today!

[i] https://hbr.org/2019/01/customers-surveys-are-no-substitute-for-actually-talking-to-customers?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=linkedin&tpcc=orgsocial_edit

[ii] Chief Executive Group, 2024

The post HBR Article on Customers also Applies to Employees appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The book’s title is It’s The Manager, and here are those words below the title: Gallup® Finds That The Quality of Managers and Team Leaders Is The Single Biggest Factor In Your Organization’s Long-Term Success

Purposeful to Call Out Team Leaders for Retention

Jim’s including “team leaders” here is very purposeful, as he makes clear in the book. But candidly, that isn’t news to us. Two recent clients come to mind, both in manufacturing, where in one case the top manufacturing executive over nine plants made the unilateral decision that team leaders would own retention goals and conduct Stay Interviews with their teams. The opposite decision was made in the other company, that those supervisors who manage the team leaders would take on those responsibilities.

Which decision was better? And did that decision matter a little or a lot? The organization that leveraged team leaders cut turnover by greater than 30%, while the other company saw much smaller reductions. Having managed both engagements myself, that’s how I know that the decision to anoint team leaders with all of the leadership responsibilities for our project was the major difference-maker.

The Simple Reason Team Leaders Should Drive Retention

The argument for is simple: team leaders are in their employees’ faces every day, providing instruction, feedback, and building relationships. The argument against goes like this:

• Team leaders are on the clock, so they really aren’t supervisors
• Team leaders haven’t been trained to manage people
• Team leaders are only there because our real supervisors are spread too thin

Or this one: team leaders were chosen because they were the best workers but that doesn’t make them legitimate supervisors.

But now switch your viewpoint angle to that of your teams. They know none of the usual objections, but just that this person is my boss. This is the person I discuss over dinner each night, good or bad, and this is the person I must please each day. Employees don’t care about titles, on-or-off the clock, or how much training their boss has. The boss is the boss.

Whatever the Title, Direct Supervisors are Key Retention and Engagement

This goes far deeper than manufacturing, too, and hospitals come to mind. Nurse managers on average supervise 69 nurses, spread across multiple shifts. So, charge nurses were created to bridge the gap, to be available to answer questions and maybe do scheduling. When I visit a friend in a hospital, I always ask their nurse when they last had an individual meeting with their manager and the consistent answer is, “The last time I screwed up.”

Our hospital clients say nurse managers should be accountable for turnover and conduct Stay Interviews, despite their impossible spans of control. Yet those very nurses they are trying to retain are talking with and getting feedback from their charge nurses every day…so these charge nurses are playing the “team lead” role and likely have the greatest impact on each nurse’s retention and degree of engagement.

To cut turnover and improve engagement with the majority of workers in your company, first-line leaders matter most…regardless of what you call them.

You Can Cut Turnover by 20% or More By Putting Team Leaders in the Driver’s Seat for Retention

Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com to discuss your employee retention roadblocks and I’ll share ideas for how you can move forward and what is working for other companies to cut turnover by 20% and more by building trust through Stay Interviews and retention accountabilities.

The post Who Drives Retention Success? Gallup Says Your Team Leaders appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Gallup’s G12 Employee Engagement Metrics Surprised Me

I confess to initially scoffing years ago regarding one of Gallup’s G12 engagement measurements that considers whether employees have a “best friend” at work. I whiffed on seeing the correlation between this Gallup data and an organization’s level of employee engagement. These are code words for saying I stupidly thought I knew more than Gallup.

Turnover versus Employee Engagement

My interest though is turnover versus engagement, a choice made long ago because employee retention is more tangible and more essential as employees are either in their chairs or they are not. No engagement happens without humans coming to work first…and for several reasons engagement seems like a fuzzy metric to me. But now comes data regarding employees working from their own chairs, virtually, and whether they have a best friend at work…and how that impacts turnover. And the results aren’t good according to a Wall Street Journal report on Gallup’s recent research.[i]

“Best Friend” Impacts Employee Engagement

Among nearly 4,000 hybrid workers surveyed by Gallup, 17% said they had a “best friend” at work, down from 22% who said they did in 2019. 

Yet the data also suggests that the connection between having a best work friend and feeling committed to a job has grown stronger during the post-pandemic years—meaning workers who don’t have a best friend at work are more likely leave.

Gallup’s own report goes deeper, telling us the decrease in employees’ having a best friend at work has resulted in fewer employees recommending their workplace to others, that those employees have worse job satisfaction, and for our purposes they are more likely to leave. And that employees’ having a best friend at work correlates positively to profitability, safety, inventory control, and…as you can predict…retention.[ii]

Summarizing this data into on sentence regarding turnover reads like this:

Virtual employees are less likely to have a best friend at work and this predicts they are more likely to leave.

—–

Further Reading: Are Work From Home Employees Invisible?

—–

The More Remote We Become Means Less Potential for “Work Best Friend”

Let’s step back from these numbers and think rationally. Couldn’t we predict that many virtual employees would struggle to develop close relationships with work peers, especially those millions of new hires during “The Great Resignation” period who might never interact with their peers in person? Consider the likelihood that newly-hired virtual peers can develop these best-friend descriptors that Gallup writes about:

• Someone you can rely on through thick and thin.
• Someone who has your back and genuinely cares.
• That you keep one another informed and work together to familiarize yourselves with new technologies and processes.

Employee Retention is in Danger

There is a retention danger here. Months ago, I drafted but never published a blog entry that said there is absolutely nothing good about virtual work regarding retention. That every argument for virtual work can be reversed to become an argument against employee retention. For example…

• Good that you can recruit virtual employees from anywhere, bad that your competitors for talent have exponentially multiplied and can steal them.
• Good that your virtual employees can develop better work/life balance, bad that they can get that same benefit from thousands more employers.
• Good that virtual employees reduce your commercial real estate costs, bad that their turnover and reduced engagement will cost you multiples more.

—–

Further Reading: Does Microsoft’s Work-From-Home Warning Apply to Your Company, Too?

—–

Here are Four Retention Solutions

Gallup offers three solutions which are (1) promote intentionality starting with leaders, (2) create interactive opportunities for friendships to blossom, and (3) communicate often.

Let me offer a fourth solution which is hold your leaders accountable to a retention goal. My career-changing experience that led to my developing employee retention solutions forever went like this:

1. As an HR executive for a bank, the CEO gave me an order to cut turnover.
2. Rather than put in place exit surveys, salary surveys, engagement surveys, or solutions like the three that Gallup suggests above, we told branch managers they had a goal to cut turnover and we would report their progress each month.
3. Within 90 days turnover had fallen by 19% and we had saved over $4 million.

I said above that engagement is a fuzzy metric because we don’t measure it frequently and we never hold leaders accountable for it. Add my solution to Gallup’s three solutions and engagement will go up and turnover will go down. Promise.

—–

Looking for new ideas proven to improve your retention and engagement but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives? Write me: DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to have a one-on-one conversation on ways you can get started today on your journey to cut turnover.

—–

The post Is Having a Work “Best Friend” a Viable Retention Solution? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

I confess to initially scoffing years ago regarding one of Gallup’s G12 engagement measurements that considers whether employees have a “best friend” at work. I whiffed on seeing the correlation between this Gallup data and an organization’s level of employee engagement. These are code words for saying I stupidly thought I knew more than Gallup.

Gallup G12 for Employee Engagement Metrics

The G12 is the core of Gallup’s approach to measuring that engagement, asking employees to rate just 12 highly-researched items on a five-point scale. And one of those 12 is “I have a best friend at work”. Gallup then provides organizations with their own engagement metrics against benchmarks.

Turnover versus Employee Engagement

My interest though is turnover versus engagement, a choice made long ago because employee retention is more tangible and more essential as employees are either in their chairs or they are not. No engagement happens without humans coming to work first…and for several reasons engagement seems like a fuzzy metric to me. But now comes data regarding employees working from their own chairs, virtually, and whether they have a best friend at work…and how that impacts turnover. And the results aren’t good according to a Wall Street Journal report on Gallup’s recent research.[i]

“Best Friend” Impacts Employee Engagement

Among nearly 4,000 hybrid workers surveyed by Gallup in June, 17% said they had a “best friend” at work, down from 22% who said they did in 2019. Yet the data also suggests that the connection between having a best work friend and feeling committed to a job has grown stronger during the post-pandemic years—meaning workers who don’t have a best friend at work are more likely leave.

Gallup’s own report goes deeper, telling us the decrease in employees’ having a best friend at work has resulted in fewer employees recommending their workplace to others, that those employees have worse job satisfaction, and for our purposes they are more likely to leave. And that employees’ having a best friend at work correlates positively to profitability, safety, inventory control, and…as you can predict…retention.[ii]

Summarizing this data into on sentence regarding turnover reads like this:

Virtual employees are less likely to have a best friend at work and this predicts they are more likely to leave.

The More Remote We Become Means Less Potential for “Work Best Friend”

Let’s step back from these numbers and think rationally. Couldn’t we predict that many virtual employees would struggle to develop close relationships with work peers, especially those millions of new hires during “The Great Resignation” who might never interact with their peers in person? Consider the likelihood that newly-hired virtual peers can develop these best-friend descriptors that Gallup writes about:

• Someone you can rely on through thick and thin
• Someone who has your back and genuinely cares
• That you keep one another informed and work together to familiarize yourselves with new technologies and processes

Employee Retention is in Danger

There is great retention danger here. Months ago I drafted but never published a blog entry that said there is absolutely nothing good about virtual work regarding retention. That every argument for virtual work can be reversed to become an argument against employee retention. For example…

• Good that you can recruit virtual employees from anywhere, bad that your competitors for talent have exponentially multiplied and can steal them.

• Good that your virtual employees can develop better work/life balance, bad that they can get that same benefit from thousands more employers.

• Good that virtual employees reduce your commercial real estate costs, bad that their turnover and reduced engagement will cost you multiples more.

Here are Four Retention Solutions

Gallup offers three solutions which are (1) promote intentionality starting with leaders, (2) create interactive opportunities for friendships to blossom, and (3) communicate often.

Let me offer a fourth solution which is hold your leaders accountable to a retention goal. My career-changing experience that led to my developing employee retention solutions forever went like this:

1. As an HR executive for a bank, the CEO gave me an order to cut turnover.

2. Rather than put in place exit surveys, salary surveys, engagement surveys, or solutions like the three that Gallup suggests above, we told branch managers they had a goal to cut turnover and we would report their progress each month.

3. Within 90 days turnover had fallen by 19% and we had saved over $4 million.

I said above that engagement is a fuzzy metric because we don’t measure it frequently and we never hold leaders accountable for it. Add my solution to Gallup’s three solutions and engagement will go up and turnover will go down. Promise.

Serious About Cutting Turnover But Not Sure Where to Start?
Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com to discuss your employee retention roadblocks and I’ll share ideas for how you can move forward and what is working for other companies to cut turnover by 20% and more, even during “The Great Resignation” that can jump start your retention plan with real results.

[i] https://www.wsj.com/articles/forget-work-friends-more-americans-are-all-business-on-the-job-11660736232

[ii] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importance-best-friend-work.aspx

The post Gallup’s Post-Pandemic “Best Friend” Turnover Solution appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Gallup is the grandfather of all things related to employee engagement, and recently they told us two startling facts:

1. U.S. employee engagement decreased in 2021 for the first time in a decade.
2. Managers’ engagement levels led the way as their engagement fell even further than the employees who report to them.

For the first year in more than a decade, the percentage of engaged workers in the U.S. declined in 2021. Just over one-third of employees (34%) were engaged, and 16% were actively disengaged in their work and workplace, based on a random sample of 57,022 full- and part-time employees throughout the year. This compares with 36% engaged and 14% actively disengaged in 2020, a year with unprecedented highs and lows.[i]

The same report singled out two groups whose engagement slipped more than the rest, healthcare workers and managers. Understanding why healthcare workers’ engagement would slip is easy given the whack-a-mole nature of their jobs during COVID and the extreme burnout other studies have reported. Gallup tells us managers’ engagement fall was from the lack of “clear expectations and someone who encourages their development”.

We can speculate what that phrase means during managers’ day-to-day work. Maybe for example their own development got swept under the rug due to topside scrambling to keep enough employees on the job. Or perhaps the root cause is related to supply chain issues or COVID. But let’s focus on the “what” instead of the “why”.

Manager disengagement is a major problem, a very significant obstacle to productivity. In fact, other Gallup research tells us managers by their daily actions account for a 70% variance in employee engagement.[ii] We sometimes use the term “exponential” to exaggerate some issue, some statistic, but in this case that term is a fit, knowing that the less engaged your managers are, the less engaged their teams and individual employees become.

Let’s take an important short detour here. The above paragraph discloses the major shortcoming of employee engagement surveys in that most companies’ resulting survey improvement plans are about everything but their managers when their managers are the major driver of engagement. Organizations hover over survey reports indicating employees want more recognition, more communication, more career coaching…so they establish employee-of-the-month, 10-year anniversary clocks, more town hall meetings and build “career ladders”. Then they re-survey a year later to find zero improvement, all because they did nothing to hold their managers accountable for improving engagement.

Gallup tells us engagement has hardly budged in 20+ years in that about one-third of our employees have remained engaged, all while Deloitte says we spend over $1.5 billion each year to fix engagement. Why the great disconnect between intentions, spending, and results? The above paragraph tells us why.

Disengaged managers are potentially costing your company millions of dollars and it’s time to be harsh about it. Excuses must be out and accountability must be in. Manager accountability must follow the same path as employee accountability including blunt feedback, recommendations for improvement, documentation, and continued corrective actions until that manager improves or works elsewhere.

Too often we pity long-term managers who everyone knows are marginally effective. I remember in my early HR days when I asked about a veteran ex-manager who had a quiet office, wondering what exactly he did. The answer I got was, “He’s parked”. No kidding. He was some executive’s personal favorite who had been re-assigned to hang on for a paycheck. The good news was this now ex-manager had been removed from leading people, and the bad news was he became a model for getting away with incompetence.

My job each week is to provide the very best ideas to improve turnover. This week’s idea is don’t let your disengaged managers cause their teams to disengage and quit.

Are your strategies for employee engagement working? If not, reach out to me to schedule a free consultation at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and I will share what has worked for companies just like yours to cut turnover by 30% and more while increasing engagement, even during “The Great Resignation”.

[i] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/388481/employee-engagement-drops-first-year-decade.aspx

[ii] https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance-employee-engagement.aspx#:~:text=Gallup%20has%20discovered%20links%20between,)%3B%20and%20fewer%20safety%20incidents.

The post Did Managers’ Engagement Drop in 2021? Gallup Says “Yes” appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

I’m there, too, writing a new book for SHRM about the pandemic…and how organizations can build happiness for their employees as a result. The daily book-writing ritual has turned up a bunch of interesting data, not the least of which is about what many of us would have said is the smallest part of enduring the pandemic at work…which is working from home.

To establish a baseline for our discussion, University of Chicago researchers found 37% of all U.S. jobs could potentially be done from home,^[i] meaning about two-thirds of our total U.S. jobs are outside of WFH consideration.

How popular is working from home during the pandemic? See if you can connect the dots through these numbers:

• Per Gallup, more than half of at-home workers say they would prefer to continue working remotely as much as possible once restrictions on businesses and school closures are lifted; this percentage has dropped, though, from 62% to 53% as employees have had more of the daily WFH experience.
• Among managers whose employees are working from home, slightly more than half say they will allow their employees to work remotely more often as a result of this experience[ii].
• Yet a Glassdoor study found that 72 percent said they are ready to return to their company’s office; Socializing with co-workers and collaborating in person topped their lists of reasons for wanting to return.[iii]
• Similarly, a Korn Ferry survey revealed that 77 percent are finding it difficult to concentrate, citing the top distraction as watching news reports about the pandemic, followed by worrying about friends and family, worrying about the virus, and trying to work from home with kids present.[iv]
• In a Monster survey, nearly three-quarters of at-home workers experienced nightmares, loss of focus, depression and anger, while 27 percent reported physical stress symptoms like weight loss or gain, back pain and lack of sleep; a strong majority believed stress and anxiety were impacting their job productivity.^[v]
• In a SHRM study, a full 95% of employers believe most work from home will end after the threat of the coronavirus pandemic passes.[vi]
• Yet a Willis Towers Watson survey indicates employers anticipate the percentage of their full-time workforce who work from home to be three times larger after the pandemic than before, resulting in 22 percent of the entire U.S workforce working from home.[vii]
• While some commercial real estate professionals see an upcoming glut in office space that will drive prices down, others anticipate social distancing infrastructure changes will require even more space; one in-depth study by MetLife estimates U.S. occupied office space will continue growing at its pre-pandemic rate, predicting most attempts at full-time virtual work will fail.[viii]

So, there you have it, about as clear as mud, like the answers to most other pandemic-related questions.  There are other factors, too, as working from home beats riding on a crowded subway or bus with no social distancing. And then there is the birth of management surveillance tools that take a screenshot of your at-home computer every 10 minutes.^[ix] Yikes.

I think it’s important to separate opinions about working from home before the pandemic and during the pandemic. The first was routine and the new kind is forced. No employer asked our permission to force us to work in the same restricted spaces as our out-of-school kids, working spouse or partner, or aging parent who lives down the hall. Many of us don’t even have enough laptops to go around.

This same book I am drafting also shares the top seven characteristics of happy people. Among the seven are (1) happy people have overcome adversity so they have confidence they can do so again, and (2) happy people see all life events as both positive and negative, intertwined in such a way that they find emotional balance during conflicting times.

This pandemic is providing a strong test, yes? Stay Interviews have taught us the best approach to any issue is to solve it with each employee’s input, one-on-one, to learn their true needs and preferences. For those 37% of jobs that can be done from home, managers and their individual employees should collaborate regarding what works best. This is just one area where we are training managers today to facilitate Stay Interviews effectively by asking, listening, and probing for more information…to get to the best answer for all. 

Contact us to train your leaders to conduct Stay Interviews virtually with your employees today at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com.

[i] https://brentneiman.com/research/DN.pdf

[ii] 2. Gallup new workplace: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/309620/coronavirus-change-next-normal-workplace.aspx

[iii] https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/Pages/Nearly-75-Percent-Remote-Workers-Eager-Return-to-the-Office.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~HR%20Daily~NL_2020-5-29_HR-Daily&linktext=Nearly-75-Percent-of-Remote-Workers-Eager-to-Return-to-the-Office&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWVdJek5HRTJPR0ptTlRSaSIsInQiOiJNb0dYdDU0blRDcEJDOEgzRjUrY25HT3l3TU55cWk4XC8xVTloYVdLRGgzYVBJdjhwTldFc01iUFpwNU14Z1Y4U05kaXF1WHNWa3RTVWs4SVhwcEc2VG1DbWw1TVp4bktjYmE5TjJQUTBtY05DZnpESGtYZlp6aExWXC9mcWp1Vyt2In0%3D

[iv] 2  Employees embrace remote work: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/majority-employees-embrace-remote-work-coronavirus-covid19.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~Talent~NL_2020-4-29_Talent-Acquisition&linktext=Majority-of-Employees-Embrace-Remote-Work&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTTJNeU1UUTBNVEF4T0dJeSIsInQiOiJ0b2JzQjFPXC9mNjNwdDFmOENOZmVsaUJwNlNUZDJCQ0pKWHRsS3Vldmg1Wmc3ejhMUzBLYlhYNkx6ak5cL3g4QklTdU5oZXNGWnlYejBBZTNVM1dnY3VMdzBzc2lcL1FmYU5RQ1VIMzh4NUJwcDExNWdTOEpGSUttVnNvcHNcL1BGXC94In0%3D

[v] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/majority-employees-embrace-remote-work-coronavirus-covid19.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~Talent~NL_2020-4-29_Talent-Acquisition&linktext=Majority-of-Employees-Embrace-Remote-Work&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTTJNeU1UUTBNVEF4T0dJeSIsInQiOiJ0b2JzQjFPXC9mNjNwdDFmOENOZmVsaUJwNlNUZDJCQ0pKWHRsS3Vldmg1Wmc3ejhMUzBLYlhYNkx6ak5cL3g4QklTdU5oZXNGWnlYejBBZTNVM1dnY3VMdzBzc2lcL1FmYU5RQ1VIMzh4NUJwcDExNWdTOEpGSUttVnNvcHNcL1BGXC94In0%3D

[vi] 2  WFH not permanent: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/shrm-covid-coronavirus-employers-say-remote-work-not-here-to-stay.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~Talent~NL_2020-5-6_Talent-Acquisition&linktext=Employers-Say-Remote-Work-Is-Not-Here-to-Stay&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTkRZNVlUY3dPREkyTWpSayIsInQiOiJrMlVWbzBSckI5bWpnXC81dHZyT1RKUGdqbGlYcnk1elp4MUFoUSswcDl0eHNGek8wQUkyWVl6TzFCR0JiOUMxdTEzTVVtNHI0T05KaldZRCthTjk5U1h1Ukx1bW9QVGNmVGNpdGQyMWtDdkV3OUhPTk4zSUNlWUFcLzZhN1BlNlF4In0%3D

[vii] 2. 75% eager to return to offices: https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/Pages/Nearly-75-Percent-Remote-Workers-Eager-Return-to-the-Office.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~HR%20Daily~NL_2020-5-29_HR-Daily&linktext=Nearly-75-Percent-of-Remote-Workers-Eager-to-Return-to-the-Office&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWVdJek5HRTJPR0ptTlRSaSIsInQiOiJNb0dYdDU0blRDcEJDOEgzRjUrY25HT3l3TU55cWk4XC8xVTloYVdLRGgzYVBJdjhwTldFc01iUFpwNU14Z1Y4U05kaXF1WHNWa3RTVWs4SVhwcEc2VG1DbWw1TVp4bktjYmE5TjJQUTBtY05DZnpESGtYZlp6aExWXC9mcWp1Vyt2In0%3D

[viii] https://investments.metlife.com/content/dam/metlifecom/us/investments/insights/research-topics/real-estate/pdf/MetLife_Investment_Management_Back_to_Work_Office_Demand_in_a_Post_Pandemic_World.pdf

[ix] https://www.wsj.com/articles/youre-working-from-home-but-your-company-is-still-watching-you-11587202201?mod=djemwhatsnews&mod=djemfoe

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