Poor Engagement - what we should do ?

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

In the 1980s, when Japanese-made cars were making major inroads in the American car market and Toyota's management practices became famous, Americans formed an image of Japan as the working (if not the economic) powerhouse of the world. We saw that the Japanese worked long hours in long careers for corporations that guaranteed their employment; some even taking their work so seriously they committed suicide over it.

But a new Gallup poll has a different take on all that. According to The Gallup Organization's most recent Employee Engagement Index survey of Japan's workforce, only 9 percent of Japanese employees are "engaged," or psychologically committed to their jobs and their employers, at work. Sixty-seven percent just pick up a paycheck and aren't particularly enthusiastic about their jobs. And another 24 percent are actively disengaged; they don't care about their jobs and they're vocally unhappy with the company. Researchers at Gallup estimate that employees like these cost Japan the equivalent of $232 billion each year.

The scenario is similar in other Asian countries in Thailand, for example, only 12 percent of employees are engaged. But the western half of the hemisphere faces similar problems. The numbers are a little better in the United States, with 29 percent of employees describing themselves as engaged but that means almost three-quarters of the workforce is either disengaged or actively disengaged. The problem seems universal. Is there something about work in general that just isn't working for people?

The answer, or part of it, may lie in the nature of work and what people get out of it. Gallup recently interviewed Richard Florida, Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a Gallup senior scientist. Florida's work has focused in recent years on creativity at work. He is the author of The Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, books about what he calls the "creative class," the sector of employees who use their creative powers to create wealth in the economy. In the interview he suggests that what many employees need is an opportunity to exercise their creativity and intelligence at work and that's just what many of them don't have.

"We have a dilemma in the United States," Florida says. "Thirty percent of us, and in some other advanced industrial countries, maybe 40 percent of us, get to do creative work, are paid well, and can express at least some part of our identity in our work and enact ourselves through work. But there's 60 percent or 70 percent who do not.

"My hope," he continues, "is that 20 or 30 or 40 years out, we will have reached the stage of development where we essentially 'creatify' more and more manufacturing work and more and more of the service work."

Read the entire interview at Gallup. Read the rest of the article on Japan's engagement crisis.

Blogged on 6:53 PM by Upay

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