Marcus Buckingham Shows You The Most Engaged Employee in the World

Take Two. 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. 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
worker in the world who is more engaged than anyone else. Her name Barbara. That’s a joke. That’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. 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
the company for– have I said that already? [INAUDIBLE] She’s married, but she
doesn’t have any kids. She does have a
pet, though a python by the name of,
apparently, Gregory. [SNAKE HISSING] So that’s Barbara. [SNAKE HISSING] 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 can’t be sure that
the python’s name is Gregory. But everything else
prior to that is true. 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, that 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. 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. The gig job gives
us a chance to do something that matters to us. –to do what you love. Some stability here and
then some flexibility, creativity there is something
that we could all learn from. We learn 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. Remote 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? 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. Do you feel part of a team? Does the team bring
out the best in you? That’s how you
get more Barbaras.

Written by Raul Dinwiddie

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