Engagement: How leaders can harness its power

Reflecting on the 17 per cent of disengaged workers globally, one HR expert has noted that “people don’t quit the job, they quit their manager”, emphasising the importance of leader-led engagement.

In a recent HR Leader live stream, Peter Berry (pictured), managing director at Peter Berry Consultancy, reflected on the importance of engagement as a leadership responsibility and on how a clear purpose can help leaders deal with toxic or incompetent employees.

Disengaged workers

According to research from Gallup, globally, 21 per cent of workers are engaged, 17 per cent are disengaged, and 63 per cent are “sitting on the fence”.

For Berry, workplaces with workers who are disengaged, put in the bare minimum, and display negative behaviours introduce drains to the business. “If you’re not careful, that 4 to 6 per cent of the people that are disengaged are creating 80 per cent of the compliance and HR issues,” Berry said.

“We often say people don’t quit the job, they quit their manager.”

Leadership drives engagement

Based on research conducted by his consultancy, Berry noted that the quality of the immediate leader is the biggest contributor to engagement, being found to have a 50 to 70 per cent impact on the team, decision making, culture, and structure.

Reflecting on his consultancy’s philosophy, Berry stressed that “leadership drives engagement and engagement drives performance … If you don’t have leadership operating at an optimum level, you’re going to see employee disengagement.”

“In all instances, it’s up to leadership to establish engagement as a goal in business and to hold people accountable, to have values supported by behaviours,” he said.

For employees who exhibit high engagement indicators, “absenteeism is not a problem, safety is done well, productivity goes up, sales revenue goes up, [and] profitability is sound. So in short, engagement pays,” Berry said.

“The opposite is [also] the case. If you’ve got disengaged people who might fall under the category of competence or toxicity, then there’s a real challenge,” Berry added.

A purposeful, business lens

Berry emphasised that once HR departments observe negative behaviours in an employee, such as cutting corners, making too many mistakes, or challenging upper management, they must “get onto it quickly” to ensure that they do not “build a cohort” of like-minded toxic employees and gain negative momentum.

Further, Berry said HR departments must have a strategic business lens by measuring leadership effectiveness to deal with incompetent or toxic workers, instead of “[sitting] there firefighting or listing the grievances they’ve got or whatever, doing housekeeping”.

The best leaders are clear about the organisation’s purpose, strategy, goals, reason for existence, and the impact that it has on people’s lives, Berry concluded.