How having goals can create a more productive workforce.
According to a recent article by Gallup, employee engagement in the United States is at 34 percent, which is an increase over last year’s survey. While an increase is good news for the workforce, there is still the remaining 66 percent of either not engaged or totally disengaged employees that are plaguing the workforce. To break this down a little more, let’s look at ACME Widget company that has 100 employees, 34 of the employees are rock stars and are always working and getting the job done. Fifty-three of the employees are not engaged at work. These people do what they need to get by, but are not really adding to the bottom line and are not loyal. The remaining 13 employees are completely disengaged. These people do very little at work, are negative and are a cancer to the company. These 13 employees could be eliminated and the impact would be minimal to the organization.
There are many reasons why employees are not engaged at work. It is far too easy to be distracted and find something to help kill the time, such as social media or water cooler talk. Disengaged employees spend more time getting out of work then actually working.
Engagement is linked to positive business outcomes. If the ACME Widget Company was the “It” place to work and everyone wanted a chance to work there, then engagement would be higher; most companies however, are not the “It” company and are struggling to keep their employees engaged. Engagement starts on day one. It starts with on-boarding employees to the company, the department and the job itself.
Ask yourself how many jobs you started where you knew exactly what was expected of you. Did you receive your goals within the first week? Did you and your supervisor talk about what it takes to be successful in your new role? Unfortunately, for most people, their first week consists of being assigned to someone who doesn’t want to train a new person or isn’t very good at it; hopefully, they at least show you where the bathroom is located.
Imagine how more productive and engaged employees would be, if in their first week they received the goals needed to be successful in their new job and had a basic understanding of how those goals relate to the department and the organization. Employees would start off on the right foot and work harder and be more engaged. Most new employees do not take on their new job so they can be average or not engaged; they become that way over time, but if they had goals and a way to track and report on those goals, then chances are they would stay more engaged.
If the ACME Widget Company moved those 13 disengaged employees to engaged, then productivity starts to go up, sales numbers are reached and possibly could be the difference between success and failure of the company.