Page 79 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

50 Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

• When you go above and beyond but your efforts are never
recognized
• When you have to keep climbing over or around barriers
to get what you need to do your job
• Overburdensome processes

What do you notice after reading this list? Were there any
responses that were or were not on the list that surprised you?
Were you surprised that money did not appear on the list? In
all my research, less than 2 percent of respondents mentioned
financial compensation as a cause of disengagement, and no one
has ever mentioned it as a cause of engagement. What I notice
most about these underlying reasons for disengagement is how
relatively mundane and minor they are—not in the sense that
they are unimportant, but rather how simply and easily most
could be resolved with appropriate supervisory training. If Gal-
lup is right and disengagement costs hundreds of billions of
dollars in lost productivity, and these are the factors that cause
disengagement, it seems like a no-brainer to allocate resources
to address them. Why wouldn’t you invest in a solution that paid
back many times over?
If you’re still not convinced that employee engagement pre-
sents a significant opportunity for you to grow the bottom line
of your business, perhaps the research discussed next will lead
you to that conclusion.

Employee Engagement Research

Given the financial implications of employee engagement, it’s not
surprising that a vast amount of research has been conducted on
the subject over the past decade by many of the world’s largest and
most prestigious consulting firms, none more so than the Gallup