Engage Through Agency for Better Results

A little agency means a lot. This is something we’ve seen first-hand at Guardian. Learning programs make employees feel in control. Instead of having to predict their skilling future, they can actively prepare for it. In this way our learning programs boost engagement.

This is as true at Guardian as it is at AT&T, Google, and Shahi Exports. As I describe in my book, Hire Purpose: How Smart Companies Can Close the Skills Gap, when employees are given the chance to learn for tomorrow, engagement and bottom lines go up.

The brief excerpt below from Hire Purpose, I describe how we can come one step closer to our goal of building a twenty-first-century education and training system that works for employers and employees alike. 

Instituting a learning program and a learning culture can have a significant and positive impact on a company’s bottom line. Moreover, it can help employees stay engaged.

According to a Gallup survey of more than 30,000 respondents, almost two out of every three working adults report being “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” at work. A survey by LinkedIn showed that almost half of all adults in the prime of their professional careers (between the ages of 35 and 44) feel like “they’re on a treadmill going nowhere.” Nearly nine in ten bosses assume that their workers quit over salary concerns, but in 2018, the most common reason workers gave for seeking a new job was boredom. 

This disengagement carries a hefty price tag. Gallup estimates that every year, unengaged American workers account for up to $550 billion in lost productivity. For context, the U.S. federal government spends about $620 billion on K–12 education per year.

The vast majority of executives—90 percent, according to one study—recognize how important employee engagement is. But less than half know what they should be doing to boost it.

Luckily, employees have the answer: training. When asked to name the most important part of a job, 65 percent of millennials selected personal development.48 The opportunity to “learn and grow” at a company, another survey found, is even more important to today’s workers than “making an impact.”

Over the past few years, workers have watched their roles change and responsibilities evolve in unpredictable and sometimes uncomfortable ways. They recognize that if they can prepare for the future—if they can learn today the skills that will be in demand tomorrow—then they can use those skills to move forward. Employees want to be in control of their future, and they see skilling as one of the best ways to do so.

This desire for control of one’s destiny is a fundamentally human one. In 1976, a group of researchers studying residents of a nursing home, writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, illustrated the importance of agency using three unusual tools: a plant, a movie, and a comment card.

Researchers had the staff at the nursing home bring together two groups of residents and gave each group a different speech about what they could expect over the next couple of days. To the first group the staff offered choices: residents would be allowed to choose whether to see their weekly movie on Thursday or Friday, each would be given a small plant to take care of themselves, and they would be encouraged to share feedback on nursing home services with staff.

Adapted and reprinted with permission from Hire Purpose: How Smart Companies Can Close the Skills Gap by Deanna Mulligan with Greg Shaw, copyright ?2020. Published by Columbia Business School Publishing. 

Making a Future of Work That Works for All of Us

Offering a practical, broad-minded look at the effects of workplace evolution and automation, Hire Purpose, explores why the private sector needs to lead the charge in shaping a values-based response to the future of work. Available Now. 

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