Gallup's 2024 Study of Workplace Engagement - "We Still Have Work to Do"

Can empathy and care in leadership truly transform the workplace? Join us as Sara, Karen, Hannah, and John unravel Gallup's most recent study of the American workplace and the steep decline in employee engagement in the U.S. And while the numbers may seem discouraging, the RGV team offers up some immediate and practical steps to reverse this trend.

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Chapters

• 0:05 Employee Engagement Trends and Solutions
• 12:55 Navigating Organizational Change and Employee Engagement
• 19:58 Developing Engaged Employees in Changing Times
• 34:26 Developing Engaged Leaders and Teams

Transcript

John Broer: 0:05

Welcome to all of our friends out there on The Bossh ole Transformation Nation. This is your co-host, John Broer. Good to have you here on this installment of The Bossh ole Chronicles, and this is a very special one. We've never done this before because I am going to be joined today by my other three teammates from Real Good Ventures, that is, the amazing Sara Best, the incomparable Karen Shulman, and the remarkable Hannah Best, to talk about Gallup's most recent publication, based on the American workforce, and it is entitled "US Employee Engagement Sinks to a 10-Year Low. Not great news, but it is absolutely essential that we share this with you and we start to talk about how do we begin to reverse these trends? I mean, that's what we do at Real Good Ventures as a talent optimization consultancy. What can you start to do right now to reverse these trends of disengagement? It's possible. Let's make sure that next year, gallup has a better result and let's jump into the discussion right now.

John Broer: 1:17

The Bossh ole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode.

John Broer: 1:35

Well, this is an unprecedented episode of The Bossh ole Chronicles. We have the entire Real Good Ventures team here. Of course, there's me, there's Sara, whom you know, and Karen and Hannah. Hey everybody, how's it going?

Hannah Best: 1:48

Hey, John, real good.

John Broer: 1:53

Well, we wanted to come together for this episode because Sara actually brought to our attention Gallup's most recent data on the workplace and engagement. I'm going to turn it over to her so she can talk a little bit more about it. But this is the world in which we live every single day with our clients. You all know, at Real Good Ventures we use nothing but objective data. We don't want our clients guessing. So, Sara, give us the highlights. Why are we talking about this Gallup study?

Sara Best: 2:26

Well, I think it's just important to note that engagement, employee engagement, is not a new idea. Gallup first started measuring employee engagement in the 1990s, and they did so because they wanted answers. They started conducting research to try to find out why some teams perform better than other teams, even within the same company, like what differentiates them, what factors drive employee motivation and, of course, productivity and then retention. Those things have always been important, and they also wanted to understand better how leadership and management impact employee engagement. So these are three important trends and things to pay attention to, certainly inside any organization. The other thing is they linked engagement to business outcomes. So for 30 years, I like to say, we've been chasing engagement. There have been some periods of higher engagement and, believe it or not, most recently it was during the pandemic we hit an all-time high of 36%. So it's something we should all stay in tune with, for sure. Hannah, how do we define employee engagement? What's your definition?

Hannah Best: 3:34

We define it, or I define it, as an emotional commitment or emotional connection to the organization and its goals too. So it's how that employee brings their self to work their whole self, and we kind of look at it. There's employees that bring the bare minimum. They get the work done. That's the I have to do this work. Where engagement is found is those employees that take it. I want to do this work. They go above and beyond and they're emotionally connected to what they do. That's a great definition.

Sara Best: 4:07

Well, Karen, we've all looked at the survey results. Give us the highlight. What does this year's report tell us?

Karen Shulman: 4:14

Yeah, this year's report, which was published on January 14th of 2025, US employee engagement has declined to 31% in 2024. And that is something that has matched the lowest level since 2014.

Sara Best: 4:32

We tend to focus, on the Bossh ole Chronicles, on things that are challenging within organizations. This is not to say that there aren't organizations that have high engagement, that have really addressed these issues and are creating cultures where people can really bring their whole selves to work, but I mean this is worth noting. It's telling, for sure, John. They talk in the article about being actively disengaged. Can you help us understand what that is and what are we talking about with that?

John Broer: 5:09

Sure, so, based on Hannah's comment about engagement, is an employee's emotional commitment to the organization, its goals. They're bought in, they can bring their whole self to work and unlock that discretionary effort. Disengagement is obviously the absent of that. Active disengagement is what we would define as sabotage and subversion. So consistently, consistently for the last several years that active disengagement percentages hovered right around 17%. And when I share this, well, when we share this with our clients or organizations, when we're speaking with our clients or organizations, when we're speaking at conferences, and people go, oh no, no way, no, 17% of my people are not, you know, actively disengaged or sabotaging what's going on. Well, it's not my data, it's Gallup's and they're pretty reliable. Suffice it to say you do have some percentage of people that are actively disengaged and that's why this is such a critical topic.

Sara Best: 6:07

Well, and there's a lot in the report, but we just kind of want to help people understand an overview, Karen, what does it tell us about? What are the things that contribute to this trend of lower engagement?

Karen Shulman: 6:19

Yeah, and this is really interesting the decline in engagement. And this is really interesting. The decline in engagement Gallup found in the most pronounced place was among workers that are younger than 35 years old, and they really also found that industries like finance, insurance, transportation, technology and professional services suffered pretty greatly. Key factors contributing to the trend include, you know, people really want clarity of expectations, and only 46% of employees clearly understand what's expected of them at work, and really this is a decrease from 56% in March of 2020. From 56% in March of 2020. Wow, people also want to feel cared about. We talk about this a lot on the Bossh ole Chronicles that currently, you know, according to Gallup, 39% of employees feel strongly that someone at work cares about them as a person, and that's down from 47% in March of 2020, a bit of a decline. Another area that's contributing to this is, you know, people want encouragement of development, and really only 30% strongly agree that someone at work is encouraging their development, and that is also a decline from 36% in March of 2020.

John Broer: 7:44

Okay, so you all know this, but, like I spent a portion of my career for about 10 years I was a course leader for the American Management Association. I worked and developed new courses for them, did a lot of work in the management track, and we were talking about this then I mean, this is in the 1990s and in the early 2000s about the critical nature of clarity of expectations. It is unfair to any employee to step into a role and not be crystal clear on what is expected of them, and yet this continues to decline, and what that tells me is one we're really not paying attention, because this is almost like saying, well, let's play a game or let's learn a new sport, or something like that, and not having any idea of what is expected or what the rules are, just go ahead and do it. I'm just really, really shocked that this continues to be so problematic, and what it tells me is that we continue to put the wrong people in management roles that don't understand the nature of this.

Sara Best: 8:49

Well, John, I just, by the way, your example of like sports. That just happened to me last week.

Sara Best: 8:54

Well, I went to a beginner women's pickleball league. It just started and there were 60 of us and there were, you know, we were dispersed among the courts and they said, okay, go, and most people were kind of looking at each. Some of us knew a little bit about how to play, thanks to our colleagues like Karen and others. We we've been taught a little bit. But yeah, not not under not having a context. So I've I've a question for the team here.

Sara Best: 9:21

It would be easy to use the fundamental attribution error here and just assume that managers aren't taking the time, they don't want to take the time, to spell out what's needed. I don't think that's entirely all that may be at play. What if a manager is less attentive to detail, very comfortable with ambiguity, excited about moving forward on something and not really adept or spending the time to put the detail into it, and they have an employee who actually swears by that? I need to know, step-by-step, how this works. I need to understand what your end game goal is. I mean, isn't that a lot of what people struggle with at work is? I need these things that my manager is not giving me, but it's not because the manager doesn't like you or they're intentionally trying to sabotage you. They just don't think that way.

Sara Best: 10:11

I mean, Hannah, you've done a really good job actually. Since you joined our team now almost two and a half, three years ago, I can't even remember now you have had to come to us several times and say or at least to me and say, hey, you know, I need a little more specificity here. I need a little bit of better picture of what it is you'd like me to do or how you'd like this to end up, because our patterns are a little bit unique and different. You have high formality, I have no formality.

Hannah Best: 10:39

Yeah, I think the behavioral drives. They certainly come into play. When we talk about this need to know, or need to know what's expected. I think the behavioral drives are one piece that come into play. But even if we talk about Gen Z and the younger generations that are having a more significant decline when it comes to engagement, to me it appears that across the board, behavioral drives aside, it's just a little bit more pronounced that that need for clarity is just there.

Hannah Best: 11:09

If we think about, we talk about the whole person all the time, the whole person model, head, heart, briefcase. If we think about the briefcase part, the experiences that have been had by the younger generations. One theme John and I talked about when we had the Gen Z podcast episode was all about the need just for support, the need for continued support, and part of that support is expectation, giving clarity about what's coming, what to expect, and so I think behavioral drives do come into play, but it tends to be a trend. I think that's just a little bit more common for a generation.

John Broer: 11:44

Hannah, I think that's great insight. Sara, I think about your comment is really between the people, the manager, direct report and sort of that difference of behavioral wiring that absolutely is critical in helping them work together. I'm going back to even today. We run into organizations that really don't have job descriptions or clearly defined expectations within a particular role and once again it's like you know, if you get that high formality person that wants to take this particular role, my guess is that they've already seen in some sort of job description or through the interview that this is the stuff you're going to be doing. Now, where it falls apart is when you have a manager, for example, that is very comfortable with ambiguity as we are as you and I are, for example, that is very comfortable with ambiguity as we are as you and I are, and that can break down but just walking in and not understanding how am I being measured? How will anybody know what success looks like in my role? That is such low hanging fruit, but the fact that it's one of the three main drivers or the top driver right now for this disengagement is just still so shocking and so so flexible. So I think it's not an either or I think it's a both and.

Sara Best: 12:53

Nice, Karen do you have anything to add?

Karen Shulman: 12:55

I kind of alluded to the fact that on the Bossh ole Chronicles we often talk about if you want to be a manager, stay out of the Boss hole Zone. You want to be a good leader in your organization, you have to let people know that you care about them. I guess I was not terribly surprised to see that feeling cared about was one of the top three contributing factors to disengagement. Because people do not, you know, they're just not feeling like you care about me.

Sara Best: 13:22

So really, important it is. It is here again. We have to watch out for the fundamental attribution error. It would be easy to say that managers don't buy into that, they don't have time for that, they don't want to care about people. But I think we all have seen up close and certainly we have many colleagues who experience this every day. You know there's a lot at play. There's a lot of factors working against people and their health and vitality. We've talked about burnout on the podcast. John, I think you have a good little tidbit to share about the kind of environment that change is creating now. Maybe we can get to that in a second.

Sara Best: 14:00

But this idea that empathy and showing compassion for people is still really, really important is significant, and I don't think it's that managers don't want to do that. I think sometimes they're doing the best they can. They're swimming in pretty deep water. So we want to focus on ways to either reduce some of that stress and strain on the manager because we've talked about this on. It said something like CEOs are tired of empathy or they're ditching empathy. So I was like uh-oh, but not a healthy trend coming forward.

John Broer: 14:51

Where did you see that?

Sara Best: 14:53

It was on the Internet somewhere.

John Broer: 14:54

Okay, yeah, that sounds so counterintuitive to what's happening, but it's related to something that jumps out just based on this conversation, when Hannah was talking about engagement. You know and I know, Sara, something you like to talk about a person bringing their whole self to work.

Sara Best: 15:12

Yeah.

John Broer: 15:12

That did not exist 20, 30 years ago- 10, 20, 30 years ago, feeling cared about managers, the old command and control sort of origins of Bosshole behavior would be oh no, no, you leave that stuff at the door, you don't bring that into the office. We're here to get work done. So that's not where Gen Y or Gen Z are. They're bringing themselves to work, and I think that's where that split is happening. You have still some more old school, old framework managers or management practices that don't know how to deal with that. All they want to do is they feel the pressure to move faster, and this is where this rift is getting wider.

Sara Best: 15:52

John, as you say that the command and control model sounds a lot like mandated return to work policies and other inflexibilities that are happening. We know that that's also contributing to lower engagement. It is a very freaky and weird job market. People are getting laid off, there's a labor shortage. I mean there's so many things at play here. John, share with us what we were talking about before the podcast in terms of the rapid pace of change and what that's doing.

John Broer: 16:26

Well and we've heard this from clients actually within the last four to six months, toward the latter part of 2024, about change velocity.

John Broer: 16:35

That term has been out there, it's nothing new. But in the research Gallup attributes declining employee engagement and rising detachment to. The first thing they identify is rapid organizational change, and so I think this has become a pressure cooker. A lot of organizations are well, maybe dealing or working with fewer people. I think that they are also the virtual or hybrid workforce exacerbates that force exacerbates that. But I feel like there is this pent up energy to feel like they have to move faster and meet market demands, and I don't know if that's created by themselves or if it's internal or external. I'm not quite sure where that comes from, but it's not having a good effect on the emerging workforce. I think the younger generations see what their parents did and they say I don't want that, I don't want to work like that, and I think that I think the change of pace or the pace of change in an organization absolutely serves as a barrier to help our emerging workforce sort of fold in and really sort of buy into it and get engaged.

Sara Best: 17:46

Well, I think to that end too, organizations can test that out with their employees. Have focus groups, talk to them. How are they coping with the rate of change? Hannah, what are you seeing or hearing from your generation, your friends who are finding their way into the workforce? Any thoughts about the pace of change and just how they're coping with that?

Hannah Best: 18:09

Yeah, I was just thinking about, John, when you said the emerging workforce. I was thinking about when Gen Z or millennials emerged into the workforce. What that time was like. A lot of it was during the pandemic time, and so I think about those employees that came in probably missed the traditional onboarding process that there was in place before, so they probably never received that certain level of engagement or development. But also in that time during the pandemic, where there's a lot of emphasis on reflection for a lot of people, I think that's also where that kind of shift to finding work that has purpose and where your values are aligned became such a big something sought after for the emerging workforce and for the younger generation, and so that definitely comes into play, I think. But if I think about those early career experiences, it happened in such a state of change where no one really knew what was going on. Even Gen Z that was opening in or coming in, that was a new workplace for everyone that had been there prior too. So it's a shift kind of for everyone.

Sara Best: 19:38

So it's a shift for kind of for everyone, and I think since then we've out of his bedroom office in their small apartment in New York for the better part of the next year and a half and didn't even meet his team or his colleagues in person until a year and a half later he was interviewed and hired via the web. It's really good insight. You mentioned development. Let's talk about that in a second. But I do want to say to John, in relationship to the pace of change, you know the climate outside of organizations is worth noting too.

Sara Best: 20:10

And we may maybe first get to hear it here on the on the Bossh ole Chronicles, but I came across this yesterday, that VUCA is out. If you remember the term VUCA- volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, it was a term created by the military post-Cold War and it took on many great shapes and meanings and has been referred to often as an appropriate acronym for a lot of the dynamics that companies and people have been facing. But it says that no longer captures what we face now. The new term are you ready for this? Bani B-A-N-I? It's a new framework- brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. And I won't say more about it because that could be a whole podcast episode unto itself. What do we mean by brittle and nonlinear, incomprehensible? But yeah, there's a lot of forces at play. So let's just touch on the development component for a minute. People are not feeling at least that number's dropped down, that someone is thinking about or encouraging their development. What does that really mean?

John Broer: 21:20

Well, I think we all in our world here, we have always been about development. You know, how do we help people grow? How do we, how do we help them expand, upskill, build their briefcase, if you will. Once again, traditionally, if the market gets tight or businesses down, what are the first things to get cut? Training and development. You know, people development stuff that ought to be reversed.

John Broer: 21:46

When it comes to development, I think and I go back to the statistic you shared, sarah that's you know, managers account for 70% of the variance of employee engagement. That's why we started the Bossh ole Chronicles because the managers, like it or not, disproportionately higher role and impact on engagement and everything associated with the organization. So I think we need to start with our managers. I think, yeah, first of all, stop putting the wrong people in management roles. We've talked about reinventing the manager, reinventing the workplace for the better part of two and a half years. Start there. And I think it also starts with reframing or thinking differently about leadership and management. And if you want to understand what management should look like, just go back over the last two years of all the Bosshole Chronicle episodes. Our subject matter experts have provided great insight. But if we don't start developing and equipping our managers and empowering them in the right ways with the right people. I don't see these numbers changing very much, so that's my thought on development.

Sara Best: 22:50

Yeah, and I think that's important. The pace of work has always been fast and furious and I hear a lot of organizations say we want to develop a career path, we just haven't found the time to do it. Karen, what's been your experience with employee development?

Karen Shulman: 23:07

I think that, especially in fast-paced work and in companies that have had to downsize, that the focus is not on things that in terms of development, not on things that are very long-term, it's more short-term, give me the results, because we got to get the results, we got to hit the profitability numbers, et cetera. So the short term focus is it can detract and take us away from looking at development as a long term project.

Sara Best: 23:36

Yeah, that's so good and we know there are organizations that are doing that. They are focusing on the long term and they do have higher engagement, and there's some of the bigger names we're familiar with, like Google and Salesforce and HubSpot, but what they're doing is offering mentorship and training. You know, full on, like years long, segment long training programs and career path, like with skill development. That's not rocket science, is it?

Karen Shulman: 24:06

That actually gets at some of the other engagement issues, some of the problems that if you feel like you cared about at work, if you have a mentor, you feel like you're being developed if you have a mentor. So those are great types of programs to look into.

Hannah Best: 24:19

Karen, I like how you brought up the short-term and the long-term goals and I think, Sara, what you just mentioned, the companies that are successfully developing their people they're not doing short-term or long-term, they're doing both, but they're doing it in a continuous process. That's what individuals want. It's regularly checking up on it, instead of it's the one time a year, maybe you get to talk about what might be coming or what ways I can be developed. It's the continuous one that really, I think, helps increase the motivation and keep the engagement there for employees.

John Broer: 24:57

I always like to ask clients who profess that we're all about employee development. We want our people to grow. We want them to develop their skills. We want that to be part of our culture. I like to find out do you have a line item for that in your annual budget?

John Broer: 25:13

And what is it per person? And a lot of organizations say, oh well, we just kind of do that as needed, and I said, no real commitment to that is you put that in the line item. And if you say we've got, you know, 400 people working here and we're going to put a line item for $500 a person or $1,000 a person, and that's a big number, and then you give them a way to access it, whether it's internal or external or a combination of both, Whether you build the training or buy the training or you have a hybrid, that's real commitment. So I think a takeaway would be company leaders, just ask yourself what are you actually allocating for developing your people? And then, how does that get deployed, allocated and executed?

Sara Best: 26:03

I like that. So we're talking about training. If we had to do a quick hit list of things that organizations can do to turn things around, these are things that are everywhere on the internet. They're in all the HBR articles. They're certainly in many of our interviews. Number one train managers. Number two clarify roles and expectations for employees, like make it your business to do that first and ongoingly. I would like to add in there, too how about aligning people with their strengths? Cal talks a lot about strengths, but oftentimes and I think in a moment we want to talk about what is a solution that encompasses a lot of these things that is available to organizations.

Sara Best: 26:46

Be more transparent with your communication. Offer career growth opportunities. How about? Don't give up on employee well-being? And don't give up on addressing the burnout. You can't. We're not through it yet. It might not ever go away. It might be one of the chief things organizations have to account for and manage.

Sara Best: 27:09

And then the psychological safety. We didn't talk about that much in terms of the Gallup article, but there's a disconnect in many organizations. They say you know, we like to create an environment of safety, yet when people make mistakes, you know, holy hell breaks out or you know, people get sacked or worse. It's not okay to make a mistake, and so psychological safety will be increasingly important as we navigate this banny change, fast-paced change, crazy business that's going on.

John Broer: 27:41

Can I get back to something real quick. When you talk about wellness and I agree with that, there's a part of my career where not only was I building a corporate university, involved in learning and development for an organization, but I got to work with the person that ran the wellness program and we combined our forces. We collaborated on a lot of stuff because it just works well together. But there was a point in time in business where, you know, organizations started to introduce an EAP program and nobody wanted to talk about it. You know it was one of those. There was a stigma associated with. Well, I had to talk to our EAP provider and Sara, you know this world, Karen, I also know you know this world and there was a stigma associated with it.

John Broer: 28:22

And you want to know something we are human and humans struggle. As much as we would hope that people have find joy and excitement and meaning and fulfillment, not just in their work but in life. There's the other side of that spectrum where there is a darkness, there are struggles, there is mental illness and nobody really wanted to talk about it. We wanted to give it to a third-party provider and sort of push it over here and it's just inescapable. It's something. Wellness is something that needs to be part of the language, part of the culture. How are we supporting this in an organization? But that's a change. That's a change from the way people used to look at it.

Sara Best: 29:02

Well, that's a great segue, John, to what I know we want to highlight here. It's part of the reason we're all here on this podcast and why we're committed to addressing this issue of employee engagement.

John Broer: 29:14

Reversing these numbers, right.

Sara Best: 29:15

Yeah, we want to reverse these numbers, but, as you were talking, what occurred to me is you know, we all have one thing we can get back to or get to, and that is developing a relationship with one another in the workplace, like whether we're remote or hybrid or in-person. I think that we're missing many opportunities just to connect with one another. I don't want to sound trite or small-minded, but everyone's moving in their own direction and there's a huge disconnect, so we need something to help us stay more connected and to make that part of our routine.

John Broer: 29:54

The purpose of this episode is to draw attention to these very real numbers from Gallup, and we track these year in and year out. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. No-transcript. This is not, you know, just sort of plug in, take an assessment and you're fixed. No, it helps us understand how to navigate getting back to a more engaged, more productive, more fulfilled workforce. I'm going to go back to something.

John Broer: 30:41

If I can throw an example out there, the manager. The manager is such a critical aspect of all of this. So if we can meet the manager where they are to help them on their daily activities, that's what we're doing now and you know one example I'm going to give is the use of one of our tools called Perform. It's within the PI platform. Our listeners know that we use we're a certified partner of Predictive Index, but Perform is a central performance hub where it allows managers and their direct reports to look at everything together One-on-one workspaces, group workspaces, your calendars are integrated, Zoom, Teams is integrated, Onedrive.

John Broer: 31:22

Because of the velocity of change for the managers and their direct reports, everything seems to be exploding in a different direction. This is now a place where you can all come together, virtually or in person and say let's keep our work in front of us and make sure it doesn't spin out of control. But the beauty of that is it also incorporates the things you're talking about Sarah self-awareness with behavioral data and awareness of the other person. So I know I'm not guessing, I know that I'm talking to a strategist or a persuader or an altruist, and it's going to improve the way we work together. So that's an example of where this can be corrected.

Karen Shulman: 32:02

I think that PI perform corresponds very nicely with what Gallup is saying how do we, how do we do some engagement? How do we improve the engagement numbers? And it is empowering our managers, making sure that they're empowered first, and so, if managers can help themselves and the people that report to them, focus on goal setting and on ongoing feedback and make sure that they're concentrating on accountability and well-being in all aspects of work, these are things that Perform can actually help managers with at their fingertips, and I think that's pretty critical. It can really help empower managers first and have a direct impact on improving engagement.

John Broer: 32:46

I'm actually going to dovetail on something you said, Karen, related to work you're doing specifically, and that's coaching. Outside of any kind of, you know, diagnostic platform. I would encourage managers and leaders who are struggling out there. Get some coaching. Find a coach, somebody who can help guide you, and we don't talk about executive coaching. We really kind of frame it as leadership coaching. When you say, Sara, that's kind of how we look at it, so you don't have to be an executive. But, Karen, the work you're doing with clients has been, I mean, really transformational. You have seen it firsthand. I'm going to toot your horn for you. That's impactful because they need somebody to.

Karen Shulman: 33:30

You know, it's almost like coaching is the EAP of the 2020s, in my opinion, okay.

Sara Best: 33:37

Yeah, oh, in fact, when I was a certified employee assistance professional, that was my exit from being an EAP. I became a coach and worked with emotional intelligence, and I think that was around 2004, maybe 2003, somewhere in there, you're right, Karen. Hannah, you've been working with clients using PI Perform and you've been helping them to develop, you know, their meeting structures and templates that they can use, helping them understand the workflows and even helping them understand how to write feedback. And one of the things I think about is sure, as a manager, I know I'm supposed to give you feedback, but how the heck do I do that? What am I supposed to say? What if you take it the wrong way? Well, there's a part of PI Perform that helps managers with that. But share with us your take on it, Hannah.

Hannah Best: 34:26

I mean, I think what Karen touched on in terms of Perform is the development, or it is the learning that we can put in a manager's hands that make sure that they are being developed and then, in turn, they can learn and know how to develop their direct reports. That's the big thing and it's the hub for everything. It brings it all into one place, it's easy to use and the feedback part there's, that continuous, that word we brought up earlier. Everything within Perform is meant to develop habits. It's something you can use on a daily basis, brings you back to your work, make sure you're not missing this or that. But when it comes to the development of your people, there's reminders that are in place that it's learning to adhere to the structure, but it becomes a norm. I think over time. The biggest thing about Perform is that it's meant to support and it's meant to support our managers and the work that we're doing A lot of newer work, but we're already seeing really great learning from the platform itself great learning from the platform itself.

Sara Best: 35:37

I think it addresses all three of the chief and most prominent trends in Gallup's data this year. Clarity of expectations, feeling cared about so I have a contact and a relationship with you and the encouragement of development. The other thing that the Perform platform does is give you an opportunity to share kudos and give people praise and acknowledgement and I think about it but, if it's right in front of me, I'm going to do it.

Sara Best: 36:00

And it reminds me to do it and it gives me some ideas of what to say and how to do it so amazing.

John Broer: 36:03

If I can also call out a couple of things again in the spirit of saying there is hope. I mean, obviously, any organization that wants to work with us at Real Goos Adventures, we'd love to talk to you. But there are a lot of wonderful tools out there, but you got to put the work in and a couple of the things that come to mind is you know, when you mentioned psychological safety, sarah, that's not a squishy term, that is a real thing that can be measured. It is at the heart of it is team performance and that's why we have a scan, the fearless organization scan. That helps us measure that.

John Broer: 36:31

But I just think about the heavy lifting you've done, Sara, with a number of teams, with our clients around team development. That's work, that is a lift and that generally goes over several weeks where you are working with a specific team. They are looking at psychological safety, they're looking at behavioral DNA and not only awareness of self but awareness of others. You can even incorporate emotional intelligence, which is absolutely critical to becoming an effective leader. But your team development work, I see that as instrumental, moving forward in the health of an organization, because it now takes it from sort of the individual or maybe the manager and direct report relationship and expands it beyond. But it's a lift, isn't it? I mean it's work. But when the people put in the work man, the results are pretty amazing.

Sara Best: 37:22

It is a heavy lift. It's the stuff that people don't necessarily want to talk about, and what do we always hear? The fish rots from the head down. So inside an organization, that high-level leadership team, having cohesion, trust, psychological safety, alignment, right people in the right seats if those things are addressed, a lot of other things absolutely improve.

Hannah Best: 37:47

I would just add for most people, I think it might seem like a heavy lift at first, but when people are in it, when organizations are in it, going through, they see that there is a desire for bringing purpose and for making improvement and that brings the engagement within the process. It develops. And I'll add too, especially with the newer workforce coming in, I think what we'll find and what we'll see is that while some newer, Gen Z workers or even millennials, they might report being engaged, a lot of them also indicate a readiness to move on if their needs are not being met.

John Broer: 38:27

Right. Pretty quickly.

Hannah Best: 38:28

Again the importance of really focusing in on this work and making that lift, because I think we'll find more individuals, will be quicker to pack up and find a place that will support them or will spend time on developing them.

Sara Best: 38:44

It's almost like we, as I think about all these options and this effort that an organization can put toward increasing engagement. Maybe we could say today, the one place you should look first is at the leadership team level.

Sara Best: 39:00

Is there a healthy, cohesive leadership team at the top? Is there stress and tension? Is there dysfunction there? And if so, just and agnostic of what we do, or there are many different ways to develop leaders and teams. Just do it like engage with somebody and make it happen. Then, when those relationships improve, when there's, you know, trust and people can talk to each other at the senior leadership team level, then you can tackle things like is our culture really what we want it to be? What are the behaviors and things we're seeing, and does that represent who we really are? Do we have a compass of you know what we're supposed to be doing, how we're supposed to behave? All those important things.

John Broer: 39:43

Yes, Sara, I just one. I'm so glad we did this and I hope we do this again. I think when we have these really significant topics, the four of us should come together because one the thought partnership is great. I value everybody's insight here. But I want to direct our listeners go into the show notes. We will put a link to the Gallup article and read it. Please read it, share it with your organization, share it with your leadership and say this is the stuff that if we don't pay attention to it, it will be our undoing. Let's really commit to it and working on us, working on our health, being a healthy organization in addition to a smart organization to harken back to Patrick Ligioni is totally worth it, and organizations that do it are going to thrive.

Sara Best: 40:28

Well, gosh good to be together. Great information to our friends out there in the Bossh ole Transformation Nation. We shall see you next time you.