Sleepwalking through the Workday

I just came back from a use-it-or-lose-it week off; days that had to be taken before the end of the fiscal year, or be lost forever.  While I totally enjoyed it, the only reason I chose that particular week was to avoid losing those days.  When we work hard at our jobs we must take the offered time off from those jobs to refresh, rejuvenate, regroup, rewhatever.  It is particularly important that leaders model this healthy behavior of working hard, separating from work and relaxing and coming back ready to go.

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Research on motivation, employee engagement and productivity (so very nicely synthesized for lay readers years ago by Daniel Pink in Drive), demonstrates ways that coming back to work before one is ready doesn’t have to be a problem.

Netflix, for example, one of the first American companies to do away with prescribed vacation days for its employees, allowing them, instead, to take time when and as they need it, never tracked, but always making sure that they get done what needs to get done (novel concept:  hire really well and trust and respect those you hire to do the job and do it superbly), had another great first quarter, surpassing income and membership enrollment expectations by a lot.  Netflix also takes a page out of the classic Jack Welch guide to workforce development and high performance by giving severance packages to those who merely perform adequately.  Thus, you get to be grown up, do your job to the best of your abilities and not work in a culture that gets dragged down by underperformers and mediocrity.

With all of this as background, it should be no surprise that an awful statistic from the 2015 Gallup Employee Engagement survey grabbed my attention upon my return:  71% of American employees are “not engaged”—or, worse, get this—“actively disengaged” in their place of work.  Research demonstrates that engagement correlates with greater satisfaction which, in turn, correlates with greater productivity.  And whether nonprofit or for-profit, every organization needs and wants greater productivity, high performance and, I would hope, engaged and satisfied employees.  So, we can take a little hope (and I’m being totally facetious here) from the fact that employee engagement is tracking upwards, from 29% in 2011 to last year’s 32%.

There is a false assumption that by the mere fact that employees of a nonprofit work for a mission-driven business they are, ergo, more engaged.  If you harbor this assumption, lose it immediately.  While there are certainly days when love of mission can overpower even the most negative of work environments and allow people to be engaged in what they are doing for their eight or ten hours of work, that cannot and will not, sustain high performing nonprofits.

While I am not willing to embrace without some strong criticism of the composition of The Performance Initiative (TPI) and, thus, its work, I can accept its definition of high performance and the importance of the first of its seven pillars of such performance.  According to TPI, high performance “is the ability to deliver—over a prolonged period of time (emphasis added)—meaningful, measurable, and financially sustainable results for the people or causes the organization is in existence to serve.”  Of the seven pillars of high performing organizations, it identifies this first one as the “preeminent” one—and rightfully so:  “courageous, adaptive executive and board leadership (emphasis added).”

Paid and volunteer leadership have the power to make or break.  They can inspire and dishearten, galvanize and deflate, achieve greatness and toil in mediocrity.   And it is leadership, used here solely in its titular version, as these people are far from real leaders, which allows almost 3/4 of a workforce to be actively disengaged from its work.  Which means what, exactly?  According to Gallup, certainly a leader in understanding engagement and its variations, defines not-engaged employees as those are “sleepwalking through their workday”—just going through the motions—and “actively disengaged” workers are more them simply unhappy, “they’re busy acting out their unhappiness,” disrupting the workspace and accomplishments of others.

Only leaders can change this situation, first by being sure they are truly engaged themselves, and then by creating a culture that requires (not in the sense of mandatory stipulation but in the vein of it is impossible not to) engagement by everyone else.  It requires leaders to have the courage to say that good enough is no longer good enough plus the clarity and creativity to see what needs to be done and doing it.