It’s time to bring our human skills into play.

Every year, Gallup publishes its “State of the Global Workplace Report” in which it analyzes the health of global workplaces. The report is based on the data obtained through a poll of 1,000 to 2,000 working professionals in 162 countries.

One of the main items they measure is employee engagement. Gallup defines employee engagement as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.”

In 2023, only 23% of the global workforce was engaged at work. The number is higher in North America (31%) and lower in Europe (13%). Despite global employee engagement growing 2% between 2022 and 2023, we’re in front of a massive waste of productivity if only 1 employees out of 4 actually “finds their work meaningful and feel connected to the team and their organization. They feel proud of the work they do and take ownership of their performance, going the extra mile for teammates and customers.”

The rest of the workforce is “quiet quitting” or “loud quitting”. Quiet quitting employees "are filling a seat and watching the clock, they put in the minimum effort required, and they are psychologically disconnected from their employer.”

Loud quitting employees take their dissatisfaction even further “take actions that directly harm the organization, undercutting its goals and opposing its leaders".

In 2023, 59% of the global workforce was quiet quitting while 18% of them were loud quitting. This is a symptom that the system is broken like a water pipe with a leak that wastes 77% of the water. I’m sure that if we had such a pipe in our house we would fix it immediately. Yet the world of work continues on as if it has normalized such waste.

Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy $8.8 trillion. That’s 9% of global GDP which, in Gallup’s own words is “enough to make the difference between success and a failure for humanity.”

It is easy to see how an engaged workforce improves productivity. The two articles we selected for this month’s newsletter demonstrate that the more the workforce thrives the better the company performs at many levels and that workers thrive in environments that foster human (soft) skills.

The world of work has become so focused on technical skills that it has forgotten about human skills. Yet, they are the most reliable predictor of company and professional success, and have been proven to be the most important differentiator between high-productivity and high-profitability companies and their counterparts.

Paying attention to human skills enables companies to increase productivity and profitability without growing costs, without having to hire a single new employee. Especially for start ups, capturing a fraction of that $8.8 trillion wasted could make the difference between going bankrupt and going IPO.

It is time that we begin training human (soft) skills with the same urgency that we would experience if we would find ourselves in front of an hemorrhaging water pipe.

‍