13 – According to Gallup only 13% of employees are actively engaged at work. However, I believe that employee engagement is just a symptom. What it’s telling us is that our employees have run out of gas. Do you know your employee engagement scores? Do you know what aspects of your culture are driving this number?
75 – A tsunami of millennials are entering the workplace and 75% of them believe that businesses are too fixated on their own agendas and not focused enough on helping society. Deloitte’s 2015 Millennial Survey, Mind the Gap, found that “millennials overwhelmingly believe that business needs a reset in terms of paying as much attention to people and purpose as it does product and profit.” My research shows that it’s not only the millennials who are demanding more coaching and mentoring, along with professional development as part of their organization’s culture. When you consider your organization’s vision and key objectives, to what degree have you included your human assets?
100 million – Merriam-Webster decreed that culture was the number one word for 2014. With over 100 million word look-ups in a year, culture achieved the largest percentage increase in searches at 15%. Leaders are working to improve their corporate culture literacy. Those that don’t will fall behind. How knowledgeable is your leadership team when it comes to understanding, designing and managing corporate culture?
10 – Hewitt Associates and the Barrett Values Centre have found that organizations with a cultural entropy level of less than 10% achieved 3 year revenue growth of 33%. In contrast, organizations with a cultural entropy level of greater than 29% only achieved 3 year revenue growth of 11%. The Barrett Values Centre defines cultural entropy as the amount of energy in an organization that is consumed in unproductive work. “When people are not highly motivated by their work they channel any discretionary energy they may have into their private lives, and they expend the minimum amount of energy they can at their place of work. They take long breaks, they surf the internet, and do whatever they can to stop from being bored and to make time pass quickly. When people are highly motivated, they spend extra hours at work, and think about their contribution even when they are not in the workplace. The output from a motivated person can be twice as much as output from someone who is not motivated.” Do you know your cultural entropy numbers? How much productivity are your employees leaving at the water cooler?
1427 – In 1,427 words Mark Crowley wrote about why companies are (finally) falling all over each other to become the best places to work. Author of Lead From The Heart: Transformational Leadership For The 21st Century, Crowley makes the argument that we’ve reached the tipping point when it comes to corporate culture. Creating great workplaces is no longer a fad. In the 1970’s the quality movement became an integral component to business success. Going forward, companies that authentically embrace the value of their employees will be the ones that prevail.
At the end of the day, while numbers may be fun to play with, the real work is about creating spaces that inspire and motivate our employees to bring their very best to the workplace every single day. In each of our lifetimes we will spend almost 100,000 hours in the workplace. Let’s all engage to make these hours as impactful as possible for our organizations and our people!
