For as much as we’d like to pretend it isn’t true, companies are made of people. Your employees are how your company innovates and thrives. So, why do we care about happy employees? Highly engaged teams outperform the rest when it comes to business outcomes that are critical to the success of your organization.
The Scary Truth About Employee Engagement
If a team understands how they impact the outcomes of the organization as a whole, they can continue to drive innovation and customer delight. And as much as we measure things like efficiency and flow and KPIs, how do we measure happy employees?
Gallup recently released the results of their 2023 Employee Engagement Survey. The survey consists of 12 questions with answers that range from Extremely Dissatisfied to Extremely Satisfied. The overall survey itself and the 12 questions have been tracked and trended since the early 2000s. Gallup publishes the questions and aggregates results quarterly. Here are some key takeaways from the survey:
- In 2023, Employee Engagement dropped to 33%, down from 35% in 2022.
- Not engaged or actively disengaged employees cost about $1.9 trillion in lost productivity.
- Only 45% of employees know what is expected from them at work.
Gallup also notes that in 2023:
“Employees in the U.S. continued to feel more detached from their employers, with less clear expectations, lower levels of satisfaction with their organization, and less connection to its mission or purpose, than they did four years ago. They are also less likely to feel someone at work cares about them as a person.”
Yikes.
20/20 Vision into Work Execution and Business Strategy
As we continue to evolve in agility and get smarter with our markets, we need to get smarter with our people as well. This means we need to provide clear visibility from our Mission, Vision, and Values down to the day-to-day work each person is doing.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a great way for an organization to take its goals and translate them into simple, striking statements and attach measurable results. What’s more, with just a little more attention, we can connect these objectives to work execution. This brings clear visibility all the way from an organization’s goals to planned daily tasks.
Will this solve the employee engagement problem? Not wholly, but giving employees a 20/20 vision of how work tracks against strategic outcomes, is a good start.
Thankfully, there are tools that can help with this. Platforms like Jira Align and Jira Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) enable teams to understand why their work matters, and leaders have context into how the work teams are doing contributes to organizational performance.
If you want to implement one of these platforms but aren’t sure which is best for your organization, learn more about the differences between Jira Align and Jira Plans.
Don’t Forget to Check on Your People
What else can we do? Check on your people. Frameworks and technology will only take you so far. Your leaders need to have conversations with their peers and their managers that include coaching support and providing community.
Behind every innovative idea are the people who make it happen. At Praecipio, we help organizations connect their technology and processes so that their people can thrive.
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Reach out to our team to learn more about how we enable innovation across the enterprise.
