4 strategies to counteract employee disengagement

Some 75 percent of workers around the world report low levels of engagement at work, and it’s costing the global economy $9 trillion annually. That’s one of the takeaways from the latest report from Gallup Workplace.

One of the report’s other findings: When organizations increase the number of engaged employees, they improve a wide range of outcomes, from profitability and productivity to customer loyalty.

Developing highly engaged people has to be the goal for organizations that want to be future leaders. For over a decade now, I’ve seen the right techniques in action through the work my organization The DO does with our partners in diverse industries including mobility, retail, energy, food, supply chains and life sciences.

So how do you move past the phenomenon of quiet quitting? How do you overcome change fatigue and activate employees to become drivers of their organization’s strategy? Here are four insights I’ve distilled from our successful employee engagement programs.

1. Design your talent development initiatives around your organization’s own business challenges. Rather than sending people off to an institution to learn theory and cases that aren’t relevant to them, you can use your learning space as an experimentation space, engaging participants around finding solutions to problems they’ve experienced first hand. 

2. Create buy-in for your efforts by empowering top talents to influence the design of the program through the co-creation process. It’s an effective way to unlock participants’ expertise, foster a sense of unity around a common purpose, and boost the chances of long-term success. In short: People support what they help create. 

3. Use hands-on methods to turn employees into key drivers of change. It’s essential that your efforts give people the skills and tools they need to go from strategy to action, and these can’t be learned in theory – only in practice. 

4. Think of employee engagement as building a movement. The more you are able to create mechanisms that allow ideally all employees to contribute actively in a small way to the change the company is aiming to achieve, the more engaged and satisfied your people will likely be.

If you’re interested in learning more about our approach to employee engagement at The DO, please reach out to me!

And leave me a comment to share other techniques you’ve seen working to help motivate people to actively contribute to creating the solutions our economy needs.