According to Gallup‘s State of the Global Workplace report, only 12% of Nigerians who work full time or part time are engaged in their work.
Put differently, about one in eight employed Nigerians feel an emotional connection to their jobs and are committed to adding value to their organizations. About two-thirds of employed Nigerians (65%) are “not engaged,” implying they lack motivation and are essentially just killing time at work. The remaining 23% are “actively disengaged,” meaning they harbor negative feelings toward their employer and undermine the work of their colleagues.
Projections from the US department of agriculture indicates that Nigeria’s GDP currently standing at around US$500 billion will reach US$1 trillion by 2030. What does this mean? Simply put, Nigeria’s economy will have about US$500 billion worth of new customers. Competing for those customers will be the definition of dominating the market in Nigeria. The winners will enjoy thriving businesses and workplaces.
Companies that double the number of their engaged employees will be best positioned to win the lion’s share of the US$500 billion in new customers. This is huge and a wakeup call for corporate executives to reposition themselves for greater effectiveness.
The foundation for corporate growth is the understanding that growth on its own does not just happen. It is the natural result of strategic and operational effectiveness. You can’t carry on with your business based on your current operational model and expect any different result. That means positioning your company to get a big chunk of Nigeria’s growing customer explosion will begin by overhauling your current business systems to increase your employee engagement. This is so because to win customers and a bigger share of the market place, a business leader must first win the hearts and minds of his/her employees.
Research shows that effective leadership is the bedrock of employee engagement. Unfortunately the very word, leadership loses its conventional meaning in the face of a highly corporate world that now thrives on innovation. Leadership has come to mean more than leading other people to perform task that will lead to the realization of a set goal or mission. Forward thinking companies see leadership very differently which of course results in their impressive performance and market dominion.
According to Edward Cattmul, President of Walt Disney ranked 71 on Forbes 2000 and 58 as America’s Best Employers, Disney is not about just making up how to do computer generated movies, it is making up how to run a company of diverse people who can make something together that no one could make alone.
This culture of creating a company where everybody is important, feels a sense of belonging, valued and respected is the highest driver of employee engagement and the key to unlock the innovative power of your work force. It is in such organisations that you find employees who are not competing on whose ideas rule the day but on what works best for the company. So rather than putting forth an idea and forcing everyone to follow along they create an environment where every idea is open to collective criticism until it refined into the best piece of idea. Innovation then becomes a collective idea.
That reminds me of a situation in Google, another impressive company ranked by Glassdoor as the 4th best place to work in 2017. Bill Coughran, Google’s vice president of engineering at a time was faced with the critical mission of finding solution to the company’s burgeoning need of data storage to match increasing searches around the globe.
The search for a solution on storing and managing their growing data demand, produced two teams of engineers working out a solution. At the end of the day, one team recommended to add systems on top of the existing Google File System (GFS). The idea was to add system layers on top of the existing ones to support services the existing ones could not. The other team made up newer engineers less experienced than the first team though that the company needed a completely new system.
Now even though Coughran knew that the idea of the first team was better, he allowed both team to pursue their ideas, a project that will take about two years. The reason was that Mr Coughran did not see himself as an idea dictator, but rather as one responsible for injecting honesty into the work process by driving debate. So they encouraged both teams to build prototypes so they can test them discover for themselves the strengths and weaknesses.
When the second team, that’s the ones that recommended a completely new system shared their prototype, something went wrong with the website in the middle of the night. So the other approach was selected. Yet as the need for storage continued to intensify, Mr Coughran selected two people from the second team to join the first team to ensure they don’t lose the ideas of this group.
This open source approach is one of Google’s core competencies which drive their innovation. Google knows how to their people to play out their passion. They make it possible for their people to willingly contribute to their innovative process.
To unlock the best potentials in your employees, you will have to create a work environment where people are willing and able to create solutions through innovation. You will have to create a world in which people want to belong. Ask yourself for example, what kind of banking institution does people want to work in? Now imagine a bank that runs like a community where all the minority voices can speak out without fear and are heard.
Best-in-class leaders see themselves as responsible for creating an environment where people are willing and able to contribute their talents and passion. This is the competence that delivers employee engagement to them. If you are thinking seriously about positioning your company to rule the market, then you will have to recast your leadership model to align with this.
Brian Reuben
