Key learnings from the Gallup 2024 study

The "State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report" by Gallup provides comprehensive insights into the global employee experience, mental health, and engagement. Here are the key facts to remember:

Employee Mental Health

• Daily Loneliness: 20% of the world's employees experience daily loneliness, with higher rates among fully remote workers (25%) compared to on-site workers (16%).
• Wellbeing of Younger Employees: Wellbeing among younger employees under 35 dropped in 2023, reflecting a broader happiness gap between generations.
• Engagement and Life Experience: Employee engagement significantly affects overall life experiences, with disengaged workers experiencing high levels of stress and worry.

Managerial Role

• Managerial Impact: Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Engaged managers are crucial for fostering engaged teams.
• Negative Experiences: Managers often have more negative daily experiences (stress, anger, sadness) compared to non-managers, despite higher engagement and life evaluations.
• Best Practices: In high-performing organizations, three-fourths of managers and seven in 10 non-managers are engaged, significantly boosting organizational outcomes like profit, retention, and customer service.

Organizational Outcomes

• High Engagement Benefits: Organizations with high employee engagement see improvements in absenteeism, turnover, safety, quality, and productivity. Engaged teams report fewer negative outcomes and greater organizational success.

It's also important to note that engagement levels greatly vary by region, with the United States and Canada leading (33% engaged) and Europe trailing (13% engaged).

My take-aways: 

1. High-performing organizations have best-practices in place in terms of management and feedback culture
2. Best practices lead to higher engagement which leads to improvements in absenteeism, turnover, safety, quality, and productivity
3. Managers have a key role to play, a role which can be demanding and stressful
4. Regular feedback and regular check-ins are critical to ensure engagement, motivation and a sense of belonging and to fight against loneliness.
5. There is an urgency in Europe for companies and organizations to focus on the engagement level of their employees.

What can organizations do?

1. Train and coach their managers to management best practices
2. Train and coach all their employees to feedback best-practices
3. Adopt digital solutions to stimulate feedback at all levels of the organization

Feel free to check out what we do on the topic at Popwork and to reach out if you feel this could help your company perform better.

We believe that it's high time for companies to switch to a positive and efficient feedback culture for more engagement and more performance, this is the very reason why we have created Popwork, the feedback culture solution.