#108 The True Power of Employee Engagement

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Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Nick Smallman, the founder and CEO of Working Voices, an organization that advises global blue-chip clients on engagement, productivity, and retention. Nick counsels leaders on increasing revenue via simple cultural adjustments. We're going to be talking about his new book that Nick has co-authored with his business partner, Dan Perry, Engaging Teams: How to Use Social Well-Being to Boost Performance, Retention, and Culture. So welcome to the show, Nick.

It's lovely to be here. Thanks for having me, Erika.

Oh, I'm so glad to have you. And your topic is so critical right now. In these wild times.

They are wild, aren't they?

Super wild. We could have a whole podcast about that. I love that you're helping businesses support their employees' wellbeing and success. Those 2 things put together.

I don't think you can have one without the other, or if you have the success, it's gonna be short-term if the wellbeing isn't integrated into that. 'Cause humans have an elastic limit, I think.

Yes, I think that's right. Okay, so let's dive in. So the first question I want to ask, you connect, just as you were saying, employee engagement with employee wellbeing. Explain that connection for us and share the key elements of creating a workplace that supports both of those things.

This is kind of the premise of the book. So I've been in business for about 25 years or so, and there's been a lot of changes in the sort of the employee-employer relationship.

Yeah.

And I think the first problem happened after the Great Recession in 2008. There were certain behaviors or environmental circumstances that came into play and they play a part in this. So what happened was, I don't want to be glib, but the accountants took over after the sort of mismanagement of the financial crisis. And we have a lot of financial services organizations who we work for. And so there was this idea of doing more with less. Which I think is a mantra throughout the global economy, and totally understandable. But the problem is, is that people then get burdened with a lot of work. So that leads to a wellbeing problem. Then you add in, you layer in the rise in technology being used to solve these problems. And we know that we're just at the beginning of the AI wave that's about to hit every workplace on the planet. So that again, diminishes our ability to communicate in a relational manner, which is fundamental for our wellbeing. Then you add in the fact that because we are hybrid creatures now, and maybe that our role has become less relational and more transactional, that lack of autonomy and maybe the lack of humanity, all those things together lead to a workplace that is distressed to some degree, and it's borne out by the figures. Gallup released a poll last year that said 77% of people globally in the workforce are disengaged to a degree, which is very high. But they reckon that the knock-on effect of that is $8.9 trillion in lost revenue. So it's not a small concern. It's actually fundamental, and it stretches across all industries.

That's a great add-on, Nick. I mean, everything you've said makes so much sense, and the fact that it's Not just a kind of moral or emotional problem, it's a business problem.

Exactly. But this is a really interesting thing. You can't just use people as vessels to get the job done to make sure your KPIs get hit because eventually, you get this sort of mass disengagement, which is what we've been seeing really since COVID And COVID wasn't the reason for the mass disengagement, it just uncovered the mass disengagement. This has been going on for That great setup.

So then what do you see as some of the keys to creating a workplace that's not like you described?

Okay, so the first thing is it depends who you're talking to. So I spend a lot of time, as you can imagine, talking to people in HR who are tasked with solving this problem. But their challenge is they're trying to explain to people in the business that this needs to happen. So it's about helping the actual leaders who are sort of at the coalface Helping them to understand the advantages of creating a good environment. So what can leaders do? That's, that's fundamentally your question, and that would be this. Firstly, leaders need to be more emotionally intelligent. They need to be more switched on to the needs of their people. For example, for decades now we've had the appraisal system. I don't think that's a good idea. I think ongoing feedback is a much more healthy way to really understand what's going on, rather than just look back over the last 12 months and said you did this right, you did that wrong. That's not helpful. And also, you've got to stay plugged into your people in order to motivate them to actually be able to remedy problems in real time. So I would argue strongly that reassessing the appraisal process and replacing it with ongoing feedback is number one. The second thing leaders can do is to set up environments where— I mean, if you bear in mind how much stress leaders are under to deliver, and you get some leaders that don't trust their employees to do the job, so they end up micromanaging them or doing the work themselves, and which leads to more stress. So a good working environment is where a leader is confident to outsource tasks and thinking, et cetera, to employees, people below them. But that's only gonna happen if, A, you understand what the capability is below you, and secondly, that that capability is allowed to flourish. And that can only happen if There's psychological safety. If there's two-way trust rather than one-way trust, whether those employees feel a sense of belonging, and most importantly, do the employees especially I'm thinking about you know Gen Z and young millennials who are in the workplace now with very different needs. Do they respect the leaders and do they respect the organization and its mission and what they're doing? Because that matters so much more today than it did maybe twenty thirty years ago.

I'm listening to you, and so much of what you're saying is it has to be more intentional in this hybrid work environment. If you're with everybody every day, and you're just that kind of a person, it's kind of going to happen. But if you're seeing them on Zoom, or once a month in the office, you have to be much more intentional about doing these things.

Of course. And you can design your workplace to be whatever you want it to be. There is a slight disconnect. between what organizations kind of know and what their objectives are. So once you fill in the blanks, once you start to talk to senior leaders about the benefits of doing this, then they have an incentive for changing course. But even when people are in the office all the time, there are so many missed opportunities to improve the working environment simply because people will say, look, I'm busy, this isn't important.

Yes.

And that's become another mantra, which I think needs to be displaced by something more productive.

Yeah, that's great. That's what I mean by intentionality. It has to be a conscious effort because you can make excuses infinitely to not do any of this stuff. I love what you're saying, which is I think that the first thing is a mindset shift. The first thing is you have to help leaders understand why this is important and then how to go about doing it.

You do. And I think what's interesting is a lot of the leaders that I run into are highly intelligent, but in a very academic kind of way. They're not necessarily particularly emotionally intelligent, but they have done extremely well in their work. And HR people will tell you it's a lot— a lot of people get promoted at work for being good at their job, not necessarily for being good at people.

100%.

But that's where the science comes in. Do you remember that advert where Jennifer Aniston used to say, and now for the science bit, if you didn't believe that some shampoo was going to be any good or not? I do a similar thing and I say, look, This isn't about just an opinion or my intuition. We look back about 30 years and we looked at all the kind of organizational development papers written by eminent scientists, psychologists, social psychologists, et cetera. And there was this common theme that was coming out of very, very different papers, but they were all to do with a similar subject. And so the sort of the granddaddy of these eminent papers is, it's called The Need to Belong by Baumeister and Leary. And they came to the conclusion that humans need proper contact with other humans as much as we need food. And if you don't get it, 2 things happen. Number one, you do get sadder. I think the Surgeon General in the last administration talked about a loneliness epidemic.

Yeah.

And I don't think that's resolving itself anytime soon. But it's not just we get sadder because we're more disconnected. Our cognitive capability goes down because we need— in the same way that you and I are having a conversation now, and the people like podcasts because they're conversational.

Yes.

We need a similar kind of thing. We are designed to be in some form of communication with our fellow humans. We're social beings. And so the workplace has become so sort of automated in some ways where people just sit in their cubicle and get on with stuff. No wonder they're demotivated. So what you're talking about is exactly right. The intentionality is just so vital to getting this right.

I love the science bit. My latest book, it's about how to get old well, and the last chapter is about connection. And a piece of data that I found that's relevant to what you're saying is that human beings have a much larger brain capacity than most other mammals of a similar size.

Correct.

Connection is so cognitively demanding. And that's what we're designed to do.

Absolutely. We've grown up in tribes and we've seen, for example, the sort of siloing of sort of society all around us. And that's because people feel comfortable with other people who are like them in quotes. And so we get a lot of that, but remember part of being like you is, are your coworkers. You are part of the same business tribe. For example. But that needs to be celebrated in some way.

Oh, this is so great. Oh, we can go so many directions, but we always say we're going to keep it short and sweet. So let me— you've said some of this already, but let's do a very quick there be dragons. What would you say are some of the big engagement killers that you and Dan see at work?

OK, there are quite a few. I think the one that concerns me the most for now and in the future is our overreliance on technology. The idea that technology will just solve everything.

Yeah.

And that's an incredibly simplistic way of looking at human relationships, because the problems that Dan and I talk about and really dissect in the book are human problems, and they cannot be solved with an app. So for example, if you have a problem with your sleep, we know that there are dozens of sleep apps on the market. They don't solve your sleep problems, they just give you data about what's wrong with your sleep. They diagnose, but they don't solve. So if you want to solve your sleep problems, it's about changing your behavior, and that would come from a human who might help you to do that, etc., etc. But it's even more relevant in the workplace because what we've noticed is that in this drive to do more with less, HR departments and organizations in general will bring technology in to solve human problems. And of course, it's not really the answer. So number one, I would say, is technology.

Yeah.

Number 2 is simply because people are so time short, they don't necessarily see the validity really of tackling these problems because as long as someone meets their KPIs and gets things done, it's like, that's one less thing for me to worry about. But it's actually quite counterintuitive. The more time you spend relationally getting to know somebody, the higher the ability of the group. I'll give you one example. There's a paper around collective intelligence by an organizational expert called Anita Woolley and Thomas Monod. And they took groups of people with different IQs. And say you had an average IQ of 110 in one group of 10 people, and you had an average IQ of 130 in another group. And this was kind of carried out in Google. They did something called Project Aristotle, which is where you can see some of this playing out. And what they found is that the lower IQ group would outperform the higher IQ group Because they listened to one another, they liked one another, they understood one another, they gave each other permission to speak, to contribute. If you think about, we're social animals and our brains have grown because we've been social, it's exactly the same principle with our confidence and our capability because we're given permission to do so. So you might find super bright people who have ego problems and are siloed not doing particularly well as a group because There isn't that sort of interwoven human connection that is vital.

So much in client groups. All right, so final question.

OK.

So you've given us a lot of great ideas about how leaders can behave differently and how organizations can lead themselves differently. If you had to give some practical advice to a leader, what they could do starting today to make their workplaces better for everyone, Yeah, there are 3 things you can do.

Number one is put the time aside. Obviously read my book and understand that it's a good idea, then put the time aside to create this intentionality that you've been talking about. Secondly, there are certain skills that you probably need to learn. So for example, how to manage uncertainty. We know that right now the US in particular is going through a deeply uncertain time with tariffs and trade wars and all that kind of stuff, and you see businesses freeze Because they're thinking, well, when this is over, we can get back to it. But the problem is, when's it going to be over? That's the problem with uncertainty. We don't know. So if you prepare for the uncertainty in advance, it's like a, call it a leadership or psychological insurance policy.

Yeah.

If you prepare for it in advance, you can then do something about it. So I would say upskilling your leaders is a great way to be prepared for the bumpy road and the consequential change that's going to happen over the next 5, 10 years.

Oh God, that's great. So thank you so much, Nick. I really think people will find this helpful. I think a lot of people know this is what you're saying is true and it's wrong, but they kind of don't know what to do about it. So listeners, you can find out more about Nick, Dan, and Working Voices at workingvoices.com, and you can buy Engaging Teams at Amazon.

Correct.

And to find out how Proteus supports leaders and their teams, you can just go to proteus-international.com. So Thank you so much, Nick.

Thank you so much. It's been brilliant to talk to you. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Yes, I hope more and more people get a chance to see your work and benefit from it. So thank everyone for listening, and until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. To find out more about how we support our clients in leadership, learning, and change, visit us at proteus-international.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.