The $8.8 Trillion Question: Can Prioritizing Employee Experience Unlock Profits?

by Kate Visconti

The mantra “It’s OK not to be OK” became more mainstream during the pandemic. But what does it mean in a work environment, and how are leaders dealing with employees who are “struggling”? How are workplaces encouraging balance and well-being at work and at home? And, how are the employees helping themselves? To answer this, we must first ask, “What does it mean to be struggling, specifically at work?” In our context at Five to Flow, it means employees are stressed out with raised levels of cortisol and adrenaline, are constantly distracted, are experiencing a lack of control, and don’t know how to manage this condition for themselves or don’t feel as though the current work paradigm supports an ability to focus and access flow.

We know most organizations are in business to make money (or raise money in the nonprofit world) and often push their employees to produce. In our challenging market, many leaders of for- and nonprofit organizations are forced to focus on quantity over quality and the financial results over the people. They either don’t have time to hear about strategies and tactics to drive employee engagement or assume that the decision-makers are not willing to invest in or put effort toward employee engagement assuming those efforts will be seen as “fluff.” They want to hear about ways to do more with less, even though employee disengagement is impacting their business, costing the global economy upwards of $8.8 trillion. We fear many of these leaders think employee engagement is just about “culture work” or fostering the unrealistic expectation we can all have a fun job the employees enjoy all the time. Are we living in an age where sometimes we just have to hunker down and work, stop whinging and whining, and just get sh*t done?

"$8.8 trillion. That's how much employee disengagement cost the world economy in 2022 according to Gallup's 2023 State of the Global Workplace Report."

I want to challenge executives, leaders, shareholders, and board members to consider something. Not all contributors to employee disengagement have to do with attitude, skillset, resiliency, the age/generation of the worker, or the company culture. In fact, in my experience, it’s more about the barriers and obstacles put in an employee’s way so they actually can’t just focus and get sh*t done. Most employees desire jobs that challenge them and provide purpose in their lives. They want to contribute to the success of their team and the overall company. Individual and team achievements – as well as learning together from failure – is how they can make progress, innovate, and tap into creativity. It is how they can exit that feeling of struggling and move forward. Unfortunately, though, they are working in a world where:

The company grew too fast, and the operational components (like business processes, policies, and technology tools) did not scale accordingly,
A recent downsize left them with double the workload,
They honestly have no idea how to do what they have just been asked to do,
Have to do the job in the way it’s always been done despite their own creative ideas for how to do it better.

Sometimes it seems as if organization leaders have lost touch with reality or what’s actually possible, expecting their people to do more with less until they have to do everything with nothing.

Allow me to share a few real examples below that can’t be solved with a simple “culture initiative,” flexible work schedules, more vacation time, or a beer tap in the break room.

You are in Sales

It’s near month end and quarter end and you are close to making your quota after having worked very hard under a lot of pressure from your leadership team. You have an existing customer who contacts you – they want to simply add 30 new licenses within the next few days for a weekend go live that includes a new group. Amazing; you are going to make your number by the last day of the month! You quickly input the order in your CRM, assuming you can simply hit submit, process for invoicing, and easily have the new licenses provisioned in time for your customer. But no, this is not the case. The order has to go through your sales manager, order administration, and legal first. It makes the first two approvals, but legal declines it Friday morning stating it needs a special line item added even though this is a simple add-on to an existing contract. It’s Friday at 4:00 pm, you add the line, submit, and it goes through the process again, from the beginning. Your customer is calling, “Where are my new licenses?!” You can’t answer yet. Legal doesn’t get to it before 5:00 pm on Friday and has gone for the day. It’s now officially the weekend, you miss the quota deadline, and your formerly happy customer does not get what they need for their go live. They are furious and you are frustrated, feeling like you have no control over your own or your customers’ success. Once this similar situation happens multiple times, you become disenchanted and start to disengage, dreaming of a job where you can deliver value quickly without process and technology handcuffs that caused eight hours of extra work and rework for a small deal that pulled you from other valuable or more strategic customer interactions.

You are a Chief Sales Officer or Senior Sales Leader

At a medium-sized product company. Your HR team recently conducted an employee culture survey and contacted you to discuss the results for your sales team. They are not good; your team’s responses show signs of burnout, disengagement, and implications of leaving your organization the first chance they get. You reach out to a coach to discuss how you can be a better leader, devastated that you are failing in this leadership role, and are curious what you can do to inspire and motivate your team. In these conversations, your coach asks some compelling questions about the sales team’s performance metrics. You share that they have a long sales cycle and that their win rate is 12%. Your coach digs into this, curious about why they lose deals so often – is it a bad product missing features or benefits your competition offer, is it priced over market, do they have too many accounts and can’t do enough due diligence to offer solutions aligned to the buyers’ needs, are they speaking to the wrong buyers, do they not have proper sales training? You contemplate this, realizing none of these potential causes are your fault, but you have zero control over your product features, your pricing, and have been told no multiple times when you asked for your team to have sales training.

"Employers are not only battling inflation and slowing growth but worker productivity that is falling at the fastest rate in four decades. This has been the first year since 1983 to include three straight quarters of year-over-year drops in average productivity per worker."

-Nela Richardson, ADP Chief
Economist, 2022

You are the COO or Operations & Delivery Manager

At a product and professional services company. What your company sells is complex and requires collaboration of multiple experts to create the perfect solution for the order, ensure all components are ready to be delivered during the install period, and relies on customers to be responsive and available when you have the team ready to conduct the deployment. Things run behind at the customer and they cancel at the last minute, causing your professional services team to go back on the bench until the customer is ready. When they are ready, the only staff you have available is new and not fully skilled on the solution being implemented, but you have to send him any way to get the work started. The new tech calls the Help Desk to support the install which consequently takes twice as long as it would have with the senior personnel. The customer complains to the new technician, who feels powerless in the situation, having been advised not to tell the customer he is new to the company. Meanwhile, your leadership team measures you on installs being on time and your team being utilized, but all of your planning is manual, there are no mechanisms in place to indicate delays out of your control, your technicians rarely receive the upskill training they need on new solutions so they can manage according to the forecasted timeline, and there is no automation to the scheduling to ensure you can get the right person in the right place at the right time. The Help Desk representative gets reprimanded for not taking enough calls because he was stuck with the new tech onsite. You are frustrated, the technician is frustrated, the Help Desk is frustrated and the whole team begins to disengage because they feel powerless to deliver value in this current model.

All of these situations are real stories of clients, colleagues, partners, or friends. Change the title and the role, and I imagine everyone reading this knows someone who has complained – rightly so – about a similar situation. They are all examples of employees and leaders stuck in the struggle phase of the Flow cycle. Unfortunately, they themselves and their leaders do not know what that means, what that does to our brain, and how important it is to put real solutions in place to promote flow and prevent burnout. Among many other annoying, headache-causing attributes, the flow triggers thwarted in the stories above are: Among many other annoying, headache-causing attributes, the flow triggers thwarted in the stories above are:

Working toward clear, achievable goals,
The ability to maintain the challenge-to-skills balance,
Executing with autonomy,
Achieving mastery.

On the flip side of flow is burnout.

At Five to Flow, we have studied The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which is recognized as the leading measure of burnout and validated by 35+ years of extensive research. The most prevalent burnout triggers are:

Lack of Control – Your sense of control over what you do is undermined or limited and you don’t have a lot of say in what’s going on. goals,
Values Conflict – There is a disconnect between your core values and the core values of your organization or workplace.
Insufficient Reward – You feel taken for granted, not recognized, or under-compensated.
Work Overload – Your workload is too high, too complex, or too urgent.
Unfairness – You or others are treated unfairly, there is cultural favoritism, assignments and promotions seem arbitrary or are only discussed behind closed doors.
Breakdown of Community – You have to work with patronizing colleagues, there is no mechanism for conflict resolution, or feedback is non-existent.

As we consider the sample stories above, all of our customers in these situations resonated with a lack of control, unfairness, and work overload. When not corrected, the remaining burnout triggers are soon to follow. As a leader, witnessing these tough situations at work also disengages you. Knowing more about flow and burnout triggers will help not only manage yourself and your own burnout but, as a leader, can help guide conversations with teammates or help you stop burnout before it becomes unmanageable.

If you work for an organization that wants to promote flow, prevent burnout, and support employee engagement and satisfaction – which improves customer experience and increases productivity, and therefore, increases revenue and profitability – consider ways you can:

Provide professional development opportunities.
Remove barriers to completing a process.
Eliminate policies that are unnecessary.
Update technology tools to automate mindless tasks.
Offer decision-making authority.

Seem like a tough list to achieve? Nah. These are the ways we helped the organizations in the vignettes above – some in a very short period of time by implementing some “quick wins” aligned with our Achieve Flow™ assessment outcomes.

As an individual, you have some steps you can take as well:

Make suggestions to your leadership team for process and technology improvements.
Identify skills training to be more equipped with your role’s challenges.
Take opportunities to maintain your health/develop yourself outside of work.
Set boundaries on how you manage your time and task load aligned to your role’s success metrics.
Set boundaries on how you manage your time and task load aligned to your role’s success metrics.

Knowing that burnout and chronic stress worsen cognition, drain energy, reduce memory, and interfere with hormonal systems, the net effect on your and your employees’ attention span and ability to focus, learn, and recall from short-term memory are detrimental to you, your team, and the business.

Fixing the root causes of these issues in your workplace is not fluff; employee engagement solutions get us all to where we want to be: happy, productive, earning money, and growing as an organization. If you want to know where you and your organization stand on overall health, take the Wellness Wave™ and book a discovery session.