The State of Employee Engagement in 2020
The American workplace has seen low levels of employee engagement for the past two decades. According to a Gallup poll that measures engagement levels, only 35% of employees appear to be actively engaged in work. These are your workers who love their jobs, drive innovation and profitability, and experience positive emotions associated with the workplace.
Meanwhile, 15% of employees loathe their jobs and their workplaces.
So, what about the other 50%? The rest of employees surveyed were completely detached, disinterested, and emotionally absent from the workplace. They also report they’re on the lookout for better jobs.
These statistics do not shine a positive light on the modern workplace or workforce. Organizational professionals are scrambling to drive engagement, create positive attitudes in employees, and keep good workers.
What’s the secret to employee engagement? Complex challenges rarely have one-stroke solutions. Engagement is a product of an environment that promotes transparency, consistency, and a steadfast trust in its people. One approach that drives engagement for many companies is open-book management.
How Can Open-Book Management Help?
Simply put, open-book management is a method of running a company that brings employees to the decision-making table.
When all of your employees are taught the basics of how the business operates, and financial data is regularly shared with them, employees can see the impact they have on the company. Then, if a bonus plan is based on that impact, the employees become engaged and invested. Team members begin to think like stakeholders and drive profitability with their own ideas, initiatives, and insight. Instead of having employees, you now have fellow entrepreneurs focused on the goals of the company and working with management to increase profitability.
When you invest time and energy into teaching the company finances to your employees, you make an investment in their growth and development.
It’s not completely intuitive that a deep dive into the P&L and balance sheet would drive engagement. It doesn’t happen overnight–understanding business finance takes some patience and time to catch on. Your team will have to learn to read the financials. Then, they’ll find critical numbers and metrics, devise a bonus system, develop a financial scorecard, and become part of decision making for the business.
What is easy to understand is that the transparency involved in open-book management shows employees that you trust them and value their insight. When you put time and energy into teaching the company finances to your employees, you make an investment in their growth and development. You are reaching out to collaborate and make partners of your employees. That’s where the benefits of open-book management originate.
[Open-book management] simply works. I feel like I have all our people running our company rather than just me and my partners.
– Chris McKee of Venturity Financial Partners
Here at AMP Creative, the benefits of open-book management (OBM) are clear. We’ve seen amazing rates of employee satisfaction. We attribute this mostly to the immense trust management has in our team and our team has in each other. It must be said, though, that having an employee-designed bonus plan that’s paying out certainly doesn’t hurt.
As part of our OBM strategy, everyone at AMP Creative is updated on our financial situation weekly. With that information, we all know what we can do to have a positive impact, and we do it–for the benefit of everyone at the company. Since all employees share equally in the profits of a successful year, we all have a stake in AMP Creative’s well-being that goes beyond our jobs. We wouldn’t have been able to achieve this level of employee engagement without open-book management. This benefit of open-book management is accessible to your company, too.
How AMP Creative Benefits from Open-Book Management
At AMP Creative, we spent 18 months learning and creating our unique open-book management style. We discovered financial insight and talent in the voices of creative directors, marketing specialists, learning strategists, video producers, and editors.
Our OBM meetings are the best attended optional meetings in the company.
For the first time in our 18-year history, all employees understand the health of our business and are innovating to overcome a volatile economy. We are well on track to have a profitable 2020. And while that is incredibly important, something else that’s just as important for our long-term success is revealed by our monthly employee surveys.
We anonymously survey our employees about their satisfaction at their job. From March to August 2020, 100% of respondents said they were happy to work at AMP Creative.
Put simply, one of the big secrets to engagement is taking away the secrecy and reaching out to your valued partners–your employees.
