From Employee X to Ex-Employee Via Disengagement

“Only 14% of professionals in Europe are engaged at work, a survey shows – compared to 33% in North America and 21% globally” was revealed in a series of articles said this week and I can’t imagine why we are so calm about it! This is immensely bad news! Not only for the lives of the people that are in that situation but for the bottom line of the companies they come from.

21% globally is a dismal amount of people to be “engaged”.  How can we be so nonchalant about this? It's a major crisis.

Let’s break it down. Irrespective of what we think of the word “engagement” we, at PeopleNotTech have spent the last years relentlessly advocating we start making distinctions between “belonging and passionate” and “emotionally engaged with their team and their work” because not looking into the delimitation and not giving it any time for analysis and thinking is irresponsible and further perpetuates the disengagement.

Being engaged is about care. “I, employee X, care about and I am happy with Y” and the “Y” can be “my company’s good standing” (if rarely) or “my teammates” or even “my work” but each and every one of these causes different behaviours and has different motivations and levers.

The first one is what an NPS score is trying to measure when they ask their infamously useless “would you recommend us as a place of work”? We’ve dissected the absurdity of the score before but truth be told the question is far from smart or edifying as well. If employee X is deeply unhappy but believes their place of work pays above marketplace salaries they will invariably downplay their own discomfort and always recommend the company. What will then happen is that more people will come in at that recommendation and be faced with feeling the same way, soon equally disengaged and perhaps still recommending the company. Will they be the productive and high performant happy employees the enterprise needs? Of course not. So what then was measured?