S4 - E3: The $9 Trillion Disconnect: Solving the Employee Engagement Crisis | Anirvan Sen & Nigel Kilpatrick

Welcome to another episode of Compassion Promise Podcast. this is Anirvan Sen and I'm joined by my friend and business partner Nigel Kilpatrick all the way from not so sunny London I know well thanks I know you're going to tell me you've got sunshine but isn't that phrase the sunshine's on the righteous isn't that right that's what they say that's what they say but we're not talking about righteousness we're talking about compassion And in our last episode, we had left it on the cliffhangers about the statistics, the scary statistics, which is 77% of the workforce is not engaged in today's business world.

And that is creating a $10 trillion problem per annum. Ladies and gentlemen, it is $10 trillion. Nigel, let's get started. Yeah, I mean, wake up, everybody.

I mean, this is, wake up, this is a big, big problem. If you aren't thinking about it, you may not have the option not to think about it because you won't be in business that long. and it's it's it's nice thank goodness we've now got people like Gallup who are now looking at this as a real issue around you know lost productivity and issues again data is just the effect you know you know you know you and I love getting into the cause of it but let's talk about the effect for a bit and when people come to our workshop we do this exercise I'll share a little bit I don't to give too much away i don't want people to come to workshop it's such a powerful day right we do we do say you know how many people you got in business oh i've got a hundred people i've got a thousand people okay just close your eyes just close your eyes and it's you know imagine you're on stage and you're looking out you're on stage and you're it's your company kickoff day or a company day or whatever there's a thousand people in your audience the people you pay every single day to work you pay these people to produce your performance now just realize that 80 almost are not engaged with you at all they're not engaged with your hierarchical leadership team your managers your people leaders your departments whatever they're doing they're not engaged with your customers either so look out just click now with your eyes closed just think about that for a moment what is the financial impact to you because you've got a very very very high scary number of employees on average that are just not engaged it's it's unbelievable so how can we sit here as business leaders and accept it and do nothing about it or just carry on doing the same old thing hoping the world will change and it's not so i don't know it's it's it's it's mind-blowing that this this 10 trillion dollars per year is absolutely gobsmacked and again i don't want to give too much away because i really want people to come to come to the promised workshop workshops yes it's so beneficial i mean you will walk away i'm not doing a sales pitch but you will walk away with so much deeper insight into what's going on.

And one of the bits of data that I got recently from a dear friend of mine, who gave me the data that from 1974 to the year 2000, the UK average annual output of productivity was at 2.4%. 1974 to the year 2000. And from 2000 to 2020, it went down to 0.

5%. the amount of money spent and i am i was part of this i was selling selling this stuff that we invested in technology in that two decades from 2000 to 2020 has been astronomical you know and in the increase in size of p&l spend you know from three to four to five to eight to 9% to 10% to 11% to 12%. It's only increase. Yet productivity has gone down.

Why? Because we forgot about the people. Yes. We've forgotten about the people.

We're using the... It's so simple and so complicated at the same time. It's a big worry. Thank goodness we have a way out of it now.

Yeah, yeah. In fact, you said forget. And I would probably, I wouldn't be too far off from being right if I said, they actually never took notice of people in the first place. I mean, look at, and again, going back to the 20th century thinking, which is assembly line thinking, people are supposed to do certain jobs well repeatedly forever.

They were like the human embodiment of robots. but when when we look at contemporary companies and again i don't even want to bring in the generational gap but even with the existing let's say gen x's and baby boomers still some of them and then some early entrants of millennials right the challenge is the reason why the I believe the level of lack of engagement is that high is because people don't necessarily want to keep doing work in silos that are repeatable because it's only using maybe 15% or 20% of the capabilities.

They want to do something exciting. They want to be able to contribute to the way things work and which is why some of these startups, even scaling apps, the companies I've seen, every employee is contributing in some way or the other, and they're not necessarily staying within their functional silos. Whereas some of the larger companies I see this as a problem I myself I myself I mean you know I had spent this is way back you know I used to work in an IT department But I always considered myself as somebody who can go out and sell well you know because my first job was sales And I wanted to sort of get out of IT and be in the front line.

But then this whole functional thinking is like, oh, but you don't have IT background and this and that. I'm like, sorry, no sales background. I said, no, but that's not true. I do have sales background and I have the ability to be able to sell complex solutions.

But it fell on deaf ears. So what I say is this whole thinking about job description, about rules and responsibilities is so out of tune today. And again, I'm not saying job description and responsibility should not be there. They should be because they form the guardrail.

But if you call somebody responsible for getting something done, then that's what it is. It is not doing the work themselves, but getting the work done. And that's where I think it brings us back to the compassion thinking, which is this person needs to understand the why am I doing it or why do I need to do this? And also understand why their managers need to do a certain thing.

And that lack of clarity exists in most organizations, which is why even line managers find it difficult for them to motivate their employees. And that's why. Yeah. They've absolutely got no authority to change it.

And again, compassionate thinking. Why have you put these barriers of, why are you inhibiting people who've got a brain in their head to not change what is so blindingly obvious? And the line map, and it's 80%, but Gallup is talking about the disengagement. It's every layer.

Yes. Leadership, middle management, boards, and the entire workforce. The immediate reaction is, oh, that must mean my workforce. It can't mean me.

No, no, it's everywhere. It's an epidemic, right? And at 80% of disengagement, we are in a crisis. Yes.

I mean, without any question or doubt, if you don't think, listeners, that we're not in a crisis, leave the podcast because you're not thinking straight. At 80%, we can't get away from it. And just think about that. you've got eight out of ten employees who are just turning up you're paying them just to turn up wouldn't it be great if people got out of bed and were excited to get to work even if their tasks were mundane even if they were rinse and repeat tasks and perceived by the rest of the business is not that high value, but they felt it was really high value and they were contributing, no matter what it was they were doing for the company.

Transformational, absolutely transformational, and that stems from thinking. That stems from strategy. We have got to break down. We've got to think compassionately about all of this because if we are building an organizational design with that intent in mind about how do we make sure we go from 80 percent crisis to 40 percent crisis over the next three years just do the mass of the financial benefit you'll gain from that i mean increased revenue customer satisfaction loyalty branding retention you know or time to performance of hiring new employees all that kind of stuff you'll get so much financial reward from just from change the way that you think about what it is now it is disingenuous for leaders to think you know i'm you know i'm a ceo of a engineering facility i've got factories they get my workforce work in the factories they just rinse repeating stuff that's what they think right it's it's horrendous to think like that yes yes absolutely let's let's do a deep dive.

You know, we talked about not being engaged, right? The challenge is many times organizations, businesses, some of the leaders don't even recognize this, that there's a problem. You know, it's one, they may not be aware of the Gallup study. Second, they may not even be aware that there is a problem that the organization has.

In fact, many of the leaders often, and I've heard this so many times. It's like they blame it on the employees that, oh, these guys are so underperforming. They're a waste of space, this and that, et cetera, et cetera. But very seldom would you hear about the underlying why.

Why are they behaving in a certain way? So let's do a bit of deep dive. When we talk about lack of engagement, how does it manifest itself? Well, I remember talking to one small example that hopefully people will recognize.

And it goes back to the talk about, I talk about from the year 2000 to the year 2020. I was speaking last year in front of about 200 CIOs on stage. And we were talking about the impact that CIOs have on compassion. And at the beginning of that, you think, what's this guy talking about?

Well, there is no thing. I'm responsible for technology and not responsible for human beings. and so what's the average amount of applications that the average user has on their desktop or in their business their phone to get on with their daily work 14 this is a simple simple example 14 systems so we have and again this is just you know you imagine a worker coming into work going oh my god i've got to open up outlook i've got to open up hotspot i've got to open up salesforce We're going to da-da-da-da.

How exciting is that? It's not. But we've just kind of done this automatic decision process of how we implement technology without any consideration for the impact of behavior and emotions of our staff because we got it the wrong way around The thought process is expediency efficiency nothing to do with emotion and that why this is one of the triggers why we got let say that represents eight or nine percent of the 80 it's a big amount there's so many others you know we've got complexity in the supply chain we've got over we've got over regulated in my opinion we've got too many rules and regulations and compliance that have come in without much thought i don't say we need we do need regulation we do need compliance we need to behave we need to be in accordance with with the right law but because we've had so much financial scandal and so much financial mismanagement and mismanagement in general over the last 30 40 years we've thought what we'll do will make a regulation for that or will put a rule into that and put a little band-aid over it rather than actually fixing the problem.

So is it any surprise that we have a disengaged workforce? Is it any surprise that 60% of the workforce believe the company they work for is corrupt? What does that say? It means that people are turning up, getting a paycheck, not trusting the people who are giving them the paycheck.

There you go. I can go on forever about this. But really, you've got to come to the workshop to really find out how to fix it. That's what the Compassion Promise really does so well.

It allows everyone to understand the principles and methodology and approaches that we now need to take for the world we're living in today and actually to put the ability to measure these improvements on a very regular basis, but also think about what it is we're measuring. We're not only measuring KPIs and data and financial benefits. We're beginning to understand the power of measuring people in a true way. And we're not saying that people equals performance all the time.

We're saying that people equals happiness. And happiness equals performance. And if we have happy, performing people, our engagement goes up. Yeah.

In fact, it's an interesting space, isn't it? So I always believe in quadrants, right? And I always say happiness and performance, when they happen in the same, if you drop a quadrant, happiness on one side and performance on the other side, when you have confluence of high happiness, high performance, that's magic. Whereas if you have low happiness, high performance, that doesn't happen.

yeah yeah i mean show me one case where the person is really performing well but that person is not happy right that's a doctor yeah yeah it doesn't happen the other thing on the other side you may have really happy people but not performing that happens sometimes but that's a mismatch that's a mismatch of an employee with their organization if it's a low happy and low performance that's an exit in my opinion right so yeah but um you know so i think i think we'll probably put some sort of a quadrant in the description yeah i i understand it because i because time and time again like you like many other people yeah when we're talking about the compassionate promise they say nigel on about it's just we can't do this is not for us we can't do it yeah say just get out of your own way yes just get out of your own way of course you can do it and will it be easy maybe not is it necessary absolutely yeah because if you don't do it the 70 will be 97 before you know it and that's the journey that we're on and this is why the Compassion Promise Programme is so important because it's going to be one of the things, we're not going to say we're the only thing, but one of the things is going to help turn around this crisis that we're currently in.

It's really needed. But leaders, you've got to believe and have faith in the fact that you need to get out of your own way sometimes and you need to look at the seven principles of business that we talk about in the program and just change it and go for it. In fact, for our viewers and listeners, we're going to provide the description of all the details about the programs in our description box. Just wanted to let you know that we conduct these workshops.

These are usually one-day workshop or two-day workshops, primarily in London at this point in time, but we're also looking at exploring other parts of the world. And these are usually done once every few weeks, a month or two months on an average. And you can visit our website, www.fifthchrome.

com or compassionatebusiness.co.uk. We've got to put the details in our description box.

But it's a wonderful conference. We will not only talk about the different aspects of compassion. We will also talk about the framework. But importantly, it's not a workshop.

It's a start of a 90-day plan. Because for us, the workshop is a way that we can create awareness. We're not doing these workshops to make money. We want to create awareness because once people see the value, the benefit, that's when we expect them to work with us.

That's where we can make money. So, again, this is not a sales pitch. we have spent a number of years developing our frameworks we've now brought them together and we are putting them we are making them available to people through our workshops so yeah if you get a chance visit our websites get the details and hopefully you can join us in one of those workshops and i had one other thing i think that we're talking about just to add to your point there is that one of the the great piece of feedback we've had from previous participants is they say when they during the workshop in that one day which is just the starter for 10 for the rest of the program is actually applying what they've learned in a case study and working working that through with a different lens on yes mindset it's the same problem you know we could have given the same problem the day before they arrived and had a very different answer to what we get and how they work through that as a team on the day And it so exhilarating to see you know the change in positivity they get from thinking this through differently and almost eager to get back and make those changes.

But yeah, it's a wonderful start to start off with that. And I think the other thing that the program really, the way it's been designed is so helpful for people who come along is they don't leave the day and that's it. As you said, it's the beginning of a 90-day program where we provide, you know, we have an online program to follow, so everything's done online, but we have these regular virtual check-ins every week or so, and we're sharing these ideas. And the group that participate become these new champions of compassion.

And so the openness to share and collaborate, you know, is a fascinating thing to watch. and sharing of his own ideas. I tried this, I tried that. Have you thought about this and thought about that?

But before it would have been, I'm not going to tell you anything. Yeah. Nothing. Yeah.

Maybe I'll share a secret with our audience here, right? The reason why we came up with the 90-day plan is because we had this problem of engagement ourselves because we had the super high engagements during the workshop, right? The people who came in, they're like 100% of them engaged almost through the day, you know. And then, you know, we're like, oh, this is such a wonderful workshop, this and that.

And within a week, that thing starts dwindling down. And we said, no, once we've created that engagement, it is absolutely required for it to have that engagement going for a period of time, because what you need to make sure is that engagement is not a single event. Engagement is a continuous process. And therefore, if you do not reinforce it, force it, reinforce it, do it structurally, it does not remain engaged.

And that is why I think it's extremely important to keep that in mind. And which is where I think it kind of brings us to the end of this episode. But before we go there, let's talk about a cliffhanger. My vote is on about, I think it's about 45 or 50% of the people who were surveyed by Gallup said they want to, or they are looking for, or they're going to look for a new job in the coming year.

Yeah. Yeah. Where do they go? Exactly.

You know, if I'm a business leader, I want the top talent, right? Yes. What do I need to do for my business to tell them I'm the place to come? Yeah.

And I've been coaching a lot of people recently, and we've been talking about a lot of career development stuff as well and executive coaching. And I say the best question you now need to ask a new potential employer is this. What is the soul of the business? Yeah.

I like it. If you can't get an answer, walk out. Yeah. it's not the place for you we have to help people describe what the soul and spirit of an organization really is uh so i think yes this quietly quitting percentage 44 percent oh my goodness me that's astronomical so you know it goes to this and it fits inside the 77 percent you know almost 80 percent of the people who want to engage with it with the with the company you know together we've got to come together this is why i love this program so much because we have a you know a sense of responsibility to turn this all of us to turn this number around none of us can avoid it you know we are in it and we're in it together so we're going to find the right methodologies and the right approaches to turn it around not just for the sake of business but actually for the sake of humanity because if we think about this in terms of 80 of our workforce is going home disengaged unhappy guess what happens next that flows through into their family and friends their thing does this feeling does not stop this is hardcore facts of what is happening so we need to break the cycle we need to think differently you need to communicate differently and we need to completely turn the turn this engagement issue back to where it was many many many years ago we're going to change it we've got to do it together we've got to come and learn how to do it together So that's my cliffhanger for you.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it is indeed bad news for most organizations where you've got such a number, 59% quiet quitters and 18% actively disengaged, which is the 77% of employees not being engaged. And on top of that, about close to 50% of them are thinking about looking for a new job in the coming year. now here is the good news the good news is they're still with you the good news is you're listening to this podcast because in the next episode i think we will not i think we will be talking about some of the ways that you could stem the exodus of employees leaving your organization so ladies and gentlemen with that let's bring the curtains down for today's show thank you so much Nigel as enjoy the sunshine I'll keep on joining the rain as always so take care all right thank you okay cheers did you find the conversation interesting do you want to take your organization to the next level of compassion in business then why don't you join one of our workshops at London for more information visit our websites and that's fifth chrome.

com slash compassion promise or compassioninbusiness.co.uk I repeat the websites fifthchrome.com slash compassionpromise or compassioninbusiness.

co.