Are Your Employees Helping or Hurting Your Organization?

Many pieces of research are out there today discussing workplace engagement, and we hear numbers across the board. So, I am going to use two statistics from two reputable firms. First, the Gallup organization reports 71% of people are neutrally or actively disengaged, meaning they are negative. Only 29% are positively engaged. That is three out of 10 people. Now, recently, McKinsey came out with a study showing that 41% of people are thinking about leaving their jobs due to a lack of career development or conversation. That is four out of ten people looking to leave the organization. It comes back to two things. One, are people pursuing something that motivates them? Number two, asking themselves a question at the end of every day. I think companies can facilitate this. Did I help the organization, or did I hurt the organization today?

?Now that is a loaded question. Most people, due to a lack of self-awareness, are not going to proudly say, I hurt the organization. Yet, if we really track and really look at the things that we did, the meetings we attended, the conversations we had, and where we had them, did I help the organization or did I hurt the organization? Now, I have often cracked this joke when you go home at the end of the day and your spouse or significant other says, honey, how was your day? Nobody says neutral. I did not have a feeling from eight to five. Most people will have opinions. Most people will positively or negatively react. It is rare that someone has a neutral reaction, thus the studies by the Gallup organization. So, when you think about at the end of every day, what if every employee had to quantify things in terms of positive, neutral, or negative? Positive would-be good work that they did great conversations, they had suggestions. Neutral might be meetings attended where nothing positive or negative really occurred. I attended and it was a good meeting, nothing to brag about. And then last the negative, did you have conversations of gossip? Did you have conversations of what people were doing right or wrong and did you present an opinion that put you at risk in terms of relationships? That is a loaded question. It is a tough question. It is a question that I guarantee you most people will not arbitrarily ask themselves, yet what if we did? What if we every single day employees come into our office or just share with us, itemize for me the positive things he did today, the neutral things he did today and the negative things he did today.

Here is the funny thing, no one's going to admit to the negative. So, in theory, can this really be executed? I do not know yet. I asked someone the other night at one of our client sites, I stayed afterwards, and this was a young lady with a lot of opinion. And I said to her, I said, I want to ask you a question and I want you to not answer right away. Today I want you to write down, I am going to give you a 10-minute break. I am going to go use the men's room, get a soda, and I want you to write down everything you did today. And I want you to write down the conversations you had with people. I want you to write down were they positive, neutral, or negative? I said, put a plus sign, a zero for the neutral, and then maybe a negative by the ones that you itemize.

?So, I came back about 10 minutes later, and she had them written out. Most of it was positive and neutral, which I expected. I said, so when you were going through your day, was it easier to remember the positive and neutral things than the negative? And she said, yes. She said, I could not even remember half the people I talked to today. I said, so do you think you said something in those conversations that might have put people off or gave them the impression you had a really strong opinion? She said, oh, absolutely. She said, wow, this was an interesting exercise to go through. I said, I want you to do it the next two weeks. So, when I saw her the other night, she came up and she said, I have completely bit my tongue and self-regulated more than ever.

?Now the question remains, did I help the organization, or did I hurt the organization? Today, studies bear out. Most people are not pushing their company forward. They are either attending the company or pulling the company back, meaning they are hurting the company. It is a tough question, but it is a valuable question.

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