Hi, I'm Mark Mitford . I spent 20 plus years working as a high level HR executive in corporate America with many fortune 500 you'd probably recognize. If y ou're a small business owner, CEO, or other professional, given the task of solving your company's HR issues and problems, then you're in the right place.
Today Is going to be about employee engagement, and it's going to be giving a broad overview employee engagement and why it's so important for your company to have a good engagement strategy. First Of all, it's focused on really what we're defining as employee engagement employee engagement at the end of the day is really focused around who is giving discretionary effort within your business. There's three categories because of discretionary gift .
Um, discretionary effort is really focused around somebody. Who's giving that 110, 120% to the business and doing their June just more than their basic job at the company. They're actually doing much more than just their basic job. And they're helping to fill in a lot of other things that are perhaps not getting done at the organization. And so that's really the focus of employee engagement.
And there's three basic categories that just about every company that looks at employee engagement, really focus on. They are, as in this order, engaged employees, these are high performers , they're innovative, they're efficient, they're committed. They understand the roles and they have high energy and they really look forward to being at the company and they look forward to coming to work every day. Then you have the next category, which is not engaged.
They give minimal effort, little passion, lack, created creativity. Perhaps they have increased absence and a little bit checked out. So those are going to be your employees who are really there just to collect a paycheck. And they're going to be getting there at eight o'clock in the morning. And at five o'clock, they're going to be clocking out and heading back home. And then the last category is actively disengaged. Sometimes your actively disengaged employees can actually be disruptive.
They can have a bad attitude. They're often late or absent. They waste time and they actually can undermine employees, other employees and coworkers. And in some cases to the work that they're doing is actually not a great quality. So quite often, somebody else actually has to fix quite a bit of their work. When you look at it , the last time Gallup ran one of these surveys a couple of years ago, the Gallup is one of the largest polling services in the United States.
They actually found out that only 34% of employees were engaged. 53% of employees were disengaged and 13% were actively disengaged. So again, the numbers are only 34%. So about one third of your workforce is engaged. Sick . 53% is disengaged and 13% actively disengaged. So when you think about it, only one third of your workforce is actually excited to be at work on a daily basis.
And that number actually, when you look at it, it's, it's been very, very similar for about the last 10 or 15 years in the us workforce. And that's , doesn't matter if it's a fortune 500 company or a company with 25 or 50 employees. So this is something that's systemic across businesses in America. The key drivers we wanted to go ahead and actually talk about and finish up with key drivers that focus on employee engagement came in connectedness, building relationships with others.
That's number one. And that's one of the key things right now when we're recording this, this is still during the , uh, the pandemic. One of the key things that happens as so many employers have remote employees. They really lack a good way to focus on connecting with employees. And it's really, really critical because if you don't have a good way to connect with employees, then it's almost like they're working as contractors and they're just contracting their services to you.
And they're really what can happen there is they can actually become very, very disengaged within the organization, contributing really doing something that's meaningful. So how does a person who's contributing? How does, how do they understand what their job is clearly defining what their job is and how does it actually fulfill the ultimate purpose or goal of why the company's in business? And the key thing here is companies just aren't in business for making money.
They have to have a much higher purpose than that. And if you're just in business to make, to make money, then you're probably really, really need to rethink about your purpose. It's gotta be much greater than that. And something that people can rally behind. Then the next thing is being free, having a sense of choice or autonomy within their business.
Just because, especially with, when you're looking at your millennials and your gen Z is coming into the workforce, they really want to have a sense of ownership and a sense of choice. And that sense of autonomy. That's why people actually stay at companies for a long time. Number four is actually around growth and growing. So the person wants to be able to not only develop professionally, but they also want to be able to develop personally.
They want to enjoy where they work, enjoy working with coworkers. They want to be focused on that. I can actually have growth opportunities to be more challenged and actually be able to do something that's a lot. That's going to give me more, an important role as a more complex roles with higher levels of authority and the last thing, and possibly the most important thing is having fun, really enjoying their time at work.
When you look at it, the key thing to think about here, I want to talk to executives and business owners that I work with. You know, most people spend the majority of their waking life at work. And that's a say in some cases, that could be a very sad reality, but it's true because most people they will spend anywhere from eight to nine to 10 hours of work, five days a week for about 40 years of their life. And they're actually going to be spending the most time working.
And so the key thing is for you for a business executive or a leader, is to figure out ways to actually allow your, your employees to have fun while they're at work because that's critical. And that doesn't mean that that's going to, that you have to , um, make the place so much fun that nothing gets done on the contrary. You need to be able to infuse some fun into your culture. And there's lots of good ways.
We'll do another podcast on that and in just a little while, but we've gotta be able to infuse different ways to have fun in your culture. So that's what I wanted to cover. And that's pretty much covers it for today. Thanks for listening for more on all things pertaining to HR, visit us at hrcatalystconsulting.com. And don't forget to like us and subscribe to our podcast. Until next time,. this is Mark Mitford. Thanks for joining.