It’s not the first time that we speak about employee engagement in relation to the yearly Gallup results about the state of the global workplace. Needless to say that the situation hasn’t improved. Steady from the year before, only 13% of employees in Europe are engaged, versus 33% in North America and 23% globally. The amount of time, energy and efforts wasted by corporate organizations is appalling and it hits companies on both sides of the balance sheet: a lot of salaries are paid for very little return, if any at all.
This time though, Gallup went further in their research and dug deeper in the analysis of the state of the global workforce not just from an engagement perspective but also in terms of the stress and anxiety employees are feeling on a daily basis. The picture Gallup paints is alarming and it calls for an emergency situation that, if not addressed with urgency, can cripple not only single companies but the entire European economy.
The global situation is such that the UN, in a recent report stated: “And further still, people’s mental wellbeing has been worsening. In the last 10 years, the number of people expressing stress, sadness, anxiety, anger or worry has been on the rise, reaching its highest levels since the Gallup surveys began.” (2023-2024 Human development report, United Nations Development Programme).
Looking at the numbers for Europe, a surreal situation emerges. Despite 87% of European employees feeling disengaged from work, 47% of them see themselves as thriving in life, 13% higher than the global average. They are also less stressed, angry, and lonely than the average global employee and they have no intention to leave their job. Only 32% are actively looking for a job, 20% less than the global average.
To summarize then, in Europe we have the least engaged workforce with no intention of leaving their job for something better. They have normalized the fact that work is a daily struggle for the salary and have adapted to make it as least stressful as possible. It sounds like a depressed workforce. In this sense, we believe this is an emergency and that it’s the responsibility of the corporate world to change it.
How? Our experience in working with different schools and corporate clients tells us that employees are looking for something more than a salary and potential success from their workplace. They want to be heard and seen, they want to be involved in the decisions that they feel can affect them the most, and they want to be part of something bigger than them, worth working for. They also want to work with teammates more than colleagues. They want to be part of a group that fosters growth without judgement, in which the team comes first and everyone is ready to support everyone else. In short, they want to be part of a company that sees them as people not resources.
For as much as this seems an obvious statement, very few companies actually deal with the humans who work for them while the vast majority sees them simply as cogs of a productive system or, worse, as a cost center. The future of the economy, especially for Europe, depends on the ability of corporate organizations to create an environment in which their workforce thrives so much that they look forward to get up in the morning and cooperate toward the achievement of a vision they share and relate to.
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