Businesses, their teams and the individuals working within them are all underutilised.

A recent Gallup survey found:

- That only 13% of employees working in Europe were thriving at work.

- 72% were not engaged at work

- 15% were actively disengaged at work

Furthermore the survey found that 56% of employees believe this is a good time to find a job elsewhere and 34% of them are actively looking for new opportunities.

Let’s just look at this for one moment. 10 is a nice round number. So for every 10 employees in a business ONLY 1 is actively engaged in what they do, giving 85%+ effort.

7 (SEVEN) of them are disengaged (quietly quitting as it’s often called these days) or as we like to describe it at HCC, sleepwalking through work. Giving perhaps, 50%-60% of what they are capable of delivering (maybe less).

At least 1 (maybe on occasion 2) employees are actively disengaged (or loudly quitting as it’s becoming known). These are the employees hanging around the coffee machine moaning about management. These people in their current state need to leave but haven’t the motivation to do so and they are being allowed to drag others down with them.

Imagine for a minute that you have 7 staff who aren’t loving what they do and 1 or 2 people more than happy to point out potential issues. How hard will it be for the 1 actively engaged employee to keep the 7 employees, currently sitting on the fence, motivated when they are being constantly told ‘how bad things are’.

The worst thing of all of this is that sometimes the actively disengaged employees could be the easiest ones to turn around (we stress we say ‘sometimes’, sometimes they need to be exited immediately). However, if businesses fail to act by not tackling this poor performance, either by exiting the employee(s) or re-engaging them, then a toxic culture either exists already or is on the horizon.

Perhaps the performance of the business is ‘okay’. We’re doing ‘okay’ and the business is plodding along pretty well. We know we have issues but why rock the boat. Let’s look at that too.

For the sake of some easy math lets say everyone earns £30,000. So the team, of 10, costs £300,000 per year (not taking into account all the other add ons).

Even your actively engaged employee might only be returning 85% of value, so that's a shortfall of £4,500.

Lets say your 7 disengaged employees are giving 60% that's a combined shortfall in value of £84,000 (£105,000 if they're only at 50%).

Then there’s the 1 or 2 actively disengaged. At best they're working at 25%, that’s a shortfall of £22,500 (£45,000 if it’s two of them).

That’s a resource of £300,000 falling short by anywhere between £111,000 to £154,500 on the investment in them. What this is telling us is the business has 3, 4 or even 5 more employees than it would need if they were all engaged in their jobs and getting to do what they do best on a daily basis.

Let’s review that, it is arguable to say that every business in Europe that does not provide a thriving working environment could be costing themselves over 100% on what they need to be. Looking at it positively, an engaged team working in a thriving environment could significantly increase productivity and delivery against current performance levels.

Perhaps even more positively, these results can be achieved relatively easily and relatively quickly with the right level of ownership/leadership/management buy-in.

Why are so many employees not thriving at work and how can this be addressed?

One of the main causes of this lack of engagement in their work is a result of what they are being asked to do, not playing to their natural talents.

Let's go back to the imaginary team of 10 mentioned above. Let us also assume, for the sake of ease, that all 10 people do the same job or that they have the same job descriptions. It will almost certainly be assumed that they can all do the same job and that they must all follow it in the same way.

However, there is 1 in 33 million chance that any of the team have the same natural talents. Therefore, we can be absolutely certain that there will be 10 different people being asked to do the same job, in the same way. It is not possible for all of them to thrive in this situation.

At Hill Coaching Company founder Oliver Hill with over 7 years of experience working with over 500 people and multiple different organsitions has come to learn a number of key things about people. Some of those key learnings are:

- People are rarely asked to do what they do best everyday

- Businesses waste a huge of amount of money on training

- Businesses invest a huge amount of money in their staff but then don’t maximise their potential

- Businesses think their staff are far more engaged than they are

- All of these points are incredibly easy to remedy if a business truly wants to.

These are but a handful of issues we have encountered and solved over the years. How you may ask. The answer is as simple as the solutions. By keeping things incredibly simple.

- No confusing jargon

- No blaming anyone for anything

- No training without the opportunity to use what you learn immediately

- No asking people what they think and then not listening to what they have said

- No treating people the same and then expecting same results from each person

- No expectations, only agreements.

Simple, agree to these steps and businesses will once again enjoy having people working in their businesses meaning they can stop working in them and begin working on their businesses.

So how do businesses get started? Ideally, but not essentially, it all starts with Hill Coaching Company’s insightful I27 employee engagement survey. After which the business will feedback the results and take immediate action by signing as many people as possible up to the CliftonStrengths Discovery Packages.

We will ask everybody to take a CliftonStrengths Assessment. HCC will work behind the scenes to collate this information and present the results to everybody (how this will be done will depend on the numbers involved).

We recommend starting from the most senior members/teams and working your way through the business in time. There are a few reasons for this. The most important one being management/leadership/ownership buy-in. If these people don’t believe in this process then we must stop immediately, as no one else will.

By the end of this process, that should take no longer than one month to complete, the business will:

- Know the natural talents of each employee that has taken an assessment

- Have a strong picture of the makeup of their team(s)

- Identify talent gaps within the business

- Identify underused existing talents

- Maximise existing talent already in use

- Have the beginning of an understanding of how to build a strength based culture

- People will get to do what they do best every day

- People will feedback regularly and help the business continually improve

- Training and investing in people will yield increased returns on investment

- Recruitment and retention will become easier

In short the business will move from one that thinks it has a good culture to one that knows it!