Marcus Buckingham Shows You The World's Most Engaged Employee

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1:02Marcus Buckingham:So let me tell you about Barbara. Barbara, it turns out, is somebody that you're really going to want to know because she is, in fact, the most engaged employee in the world.

1:15Marcus Buckingham:I know this because as head of the ADP Research Institute, we've just finished this 19-country study. We really wanted to know how high is engagement in different countries and what drives it. But as part of the research, we sliced it and sliced it and sliced the data. And we found there's one work in the world who's more engaged than anyone else. Her name, Barbara. That's a joke. It's not really her name. She's a composite. But when you slice the data, she's a manager or team leader in professional services. She's been with her company five years or more. She works on a team. She has a main job, and she's also got kind of a side gig that she does.

1:49Marcus Buckingham:She's a blogger. Oh, she works at home 80 % of the time. When she goes into an office, it happens to be the headquarters of her firm. Her commute, in case you're interested, 31 minutes to 60 minutes. She's been with a company. Have I said that already? She's married, but she doesn't have any kids. She does have a pet, though. A python, by the name of, apparently, Gregory. So that's Barbara. Listen, we don't really know that she's got a pet. Well, we know she's got a pet. We don't know that the pet is a python, and we don't know, we can't be sure, that the python's name is Gregory. But everything else prior to that is true.

2:31Marcus Buckingham:As it happens, women are slightly more engaged than men. As it happens, professional service is slightly more engaging than it is to work in construction, let's say. But of all the things that we know about Barbara, by far the single most powerful one is that she is a member of a team. A team, of course, is a group of people who've agreed to work together. We like to walk through the world as though people are the same as one another. But you look around you and you see the first thing that strikes you about humanity is we're all different from one another. The best leaders know that the idiosyncrasy of every person is a wonderful thing to be drawn out.

3:03That the weirdness of a human being is the best bit. How do you knit weirdness together in the service of something useful? The answer is this splendid piece of technology, thousands of years old, called the team.

3:19Marcus Buckingham:If you say you're part of a team, if you feel part of a team, you are twice as likely, twice as likely, to be fully engaged at work. Barbara's part of the gig economy as well, with one full-time job and one side hustle. Are there any lessons there for the world of work? The two most compelling reasons for people to be gig workers are, number one, that it gives them a greater opportunity to be in control of their lives. 25 % of all gig workers around the world give themselves the same title. President. And the second most powerful reason. The full-time job gives us predictability and stability.

3:55The gig job gives us a chance to do something that matters to us.

3:59Marcus Buckingham:To do what you love. Some stability here and then some flexibility, creativity there is something that we could all learn from. We learned Barbara's a remote worker, but that might be a little bit surprising because we think of remote workers being somehow separate. The data says that remote workers who feel like they are part of a team are actually more engaged than co-located workers who come to the office today who feel that they are part of a team. Clearly, there's some value to working at home and having the creativity and the flexibility that comes with that, the control of your own schedule.

4:30Remote and feeling part of a team trumps co-located and feeling like part of a team. The question is, how can I get more Barbaras?

4:40Marcus Buckingham:At the moment, the levels of engagement are not high at all. 15.8 % of people are fully engaged at work. That means 85 % of us around the world are just coming to work. So our challenge really is once we get people to come in and join our companies, how do we get them engaged? How do we get them productive? We would all like to have the world's most engaged person working on our team, to which the answer is you do already. you just have to help them express that and step into that. It's not a question of choosing the right person. There's nothing about Barbara that's inherently engaged. There is a set of things in her environment that each of us could help create at work that brings out the best in Barbara.

5:21Do you feel part of a team? Does the team bring out the best in you? That's how you get more Barbaras.