We Maintain Our Machines Better than we Maintain Our People
Posted on 11. Jan, 2010 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
What follows is a guest post from Paul Herr, author of Primal Management, a must-read book for managers of any experience level.
According to Gallup, only 29% of employees in the U.S. care about their work. If this were a college exam, 29% would equate to an “F.” I can therefore state with some confidence that modern “best practices” earn failing grades in “Employee Motivation 101.”
To better understand the roots of the disengagement epidemic, let’s compare how companies treat their manufacturing equipment to how they treat their employees—their human capital. The difference is enlightening.
Imagine that we are standing in a factory manager’s office. Now let’s ask the manager a basic question, “Is your machinery operating at its rated capacity or is it malfunctioning?” The manager would calmly turn to his computer, pull up a few graphs, and answer confidently, “Everything is functioning according to specifications.”
Now let’s ask the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a service business the same question, “How Is your human-capital functioning?” The startled COO would answer, “Huh?” The sad fact is, we treat our manufacturing equipment far better than we treat our employees. According to Gallup, the financial fallout from this oversight is measured in legions of disengaged employees and in trillions of dollars of lost productivity.
