A recent Gallup report highlighted that 71% of Australian employees are disengaged,15% are actively disengaged with only 14% of the Australian workforce being actively engaged.
As a comparison, recent surveys have employee engagement in the US at 34%.
The report cites employee dissatisfaction stems from being disrespected by their immediate leader, and the lack of collaboration opportunities within their team, workplace and organisation.
So who is to blame for the epidemic of disengagement in the Australian workforce? If we are to ask the employees where they lay blame, they will predominately cite their immediate leader, with partial responsibility directed at the executive leadership team and a little toward the CEO.
Is it right to blame managers for employee engagement? Shouldn’t employees be responsible for their own behaviour and development? Why should managers be tasked with driving employee engagement?
Gallup finds that 70% of the variance in a team’s engagement is related to their management. Managers create the conditions that promote the behaviours of engaged employees (or just the opposite) with the relationships they establish.
“The manager is either an engagement building coach or engagement destroying manager. Both employee and manager relationships impacts employee behavior.”
Coaches empower workers to take on challenges and use their strengths, which engages workers. Engaged workers don’t need or want a boss, but they will seek out their manager’s advice, assistance and advocacy to improve their performance. These empowering relationships nurture the behaviors of engagement — “You help me do this so I can behave like that” — that enable high performance.
The traditional boss, on the other hand, is transactional — “You give me this, I behave like that” — which can create learned helplessness, discouraging the discretional effort that engaged employees exhibit, and ultimately disengaged employees who don’t own their own engagement.
As a result, they actually teach their employees to need constant managerial intervention because they can’t overcome obstacles, plan, take accountability or operate with their strengths on their own. They have to be bossed, because that’s the environment their managers have established.
Both kinds of relationships require a manager’s close involvement, which is why managers have so much influence over engagement. But the kind of involvement is very different. The difference is especially noticeable in a key way: Coaches individualize, and bosses generalize.