S4E2: It's the Manager! Noteworthy Findings from the State of the Workplace Report

Gallup released the State of the Global Workplace report, which you can download for yourself here. Jason discusses some of the findings and how skilled managers are the critical and influential element that unlocks well-being, engagement, and results.

1. Mental health at work
2. Economic impacts of well-being
3. Manager impact on engagement
   • managers have more negative experiences
   • engaged managers ==> engaged employees
   • best practice organizations

Leadership Voyage
email: StartYourVoyage@gmail.com
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linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonallenwick/, https://www.linkedin.com/company/leadership-voyage-podcast/
music: by Napoleon (napbak)
https://www.fiverr.com/napbak
voice: by Ayanna Gallant
www.ayannagallantVO.com
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Transcript

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wherever you are on your leadership Voyage it starts[Music] here hey everybody it's great to be back with you again um leadership Voyage the podcast dedicated to your pursuit of becoming a great leader my name is Jason Wick uh here for episode two of season 4 great to be kicking it off again this March uh 2025 and getting more episodes going and more uh more information to you all it's it's exciting to be back up here and doing this all again so thanks again for tuning in and and for listening and following along and upping your leadership game it's it's a great time to do that and that's part of what we're going to talk about today is um is the latest state- of the global workplace report that came out from Gallup uh I think I downloaded it just just three weeks ago or so very very early March I I got access to this report and you can too if you go to gallup's website give me your email address I think you're uh can download the report in full or the U key insights but before we get into that uh I want to talk about a few things first of all uh as I just said it's great to be back for season 4 um season for episode one dropped a few weeks ago and it's just exciting to be back and and reinvigorated and re-energized doing all this again and sharing with you all and hearing from you all which is fantastic if you want to reach out to me uh drop me an email startyou Voyage gmail.com of course you can find me Jason Wick uh over the podcast on LinkedIn and that's a great place to reach out and engage as well but yeah basically it's it's March it's spring here in the United States officially uh I myself was fortunate enough to be able to go on a spring break trip with my family to the San Francisco Bay Area uh a road trip we went through Salt Lake City saw some friends and stayed with friends in the Bay Area which was fantastic trip a great experience for my kids to see the San Francisco Bay area for the first time uh I used to live there back in the day and uh it was nice to see some things that I hadn't seen in a while and to share some of those with my kids I hope that you also have an opportunity to take a break during um this this Springtime and uh it's always critical to you know be able to give yourself a little mental a mental uh checkout I think and and regroup and reset every so often so hopefully you all get the opportunity to do that here in this spring uh if you haven't already I've got an upcoming episode here in season 4 that's going to deal with interviewing highlights and low lights if you've got something you'd like to sh share with me please feel free to reach out via any means um in the show notes you'll see you can actually text me as well if you like there's a link in the show notes for this episode so tell me about your uh highlight or low light either as an interviewer or an interviewee I've already heard from from several folks almost 10 people so far sharing their experiences and I'd love to be able to share those uh anonymously of course with with the with the audience uh but I'm working on that episode that'll be coming up so stay tuned for that one that'll be pretty interesting and some entertaining uh items as well to be honest interviewing highlights and low lights so today's episode is focused uh on the gallop state of the global workplace report which as I said came out a few weeks ago here in March 2025 I was able to download it and read through the report there's even the key insights document which is kind of the the concise version of what's important to take away and what we've got in this report are three kind of three important parts that they focus on and uh those parts are about mental health uh the economy and then managers and the part that I want to focus on the most today is managers but these three parts you know let's talk about the first two parts a little bit just in brief the employee mental health piece uh and this is globally but they're talking about about 1if of the employees in the world uh experience loneliness on a daily basis and we heard a lot about this coming out of the pandemic I even heard once um I can't remember the source so I apologize for that but there were many many folks coming out of the pandemic who the most common number of like uh how many people in your life do you have that you can confide in the most common number was Zero actually and I thought that was a stunning number to to hear a few years back loneliness is high among remote workers and that is uh of course of concern it's it's sad to read that younger employees in particular are seeing their well-being scores going down year-over-year um and of course these uh parts of of your life they affect how engaged you are in your overall life and work experiences and we know right we know that there is a connection between how important you see your work to be how how engaged you are with work and how your overall satisfaction in life is the more meaning that you find in your work the more likely it is that you'll find more meaning in your life that you'll thrive in your life work is such an important part of of our life right it's one of the key areas that people find meaning is through their work so that's the first part of this uh report and we're not going to get into much depth there but that's the first part employee mental health the second part is about economy and it talks about how much money is lost in the global economy I think it was close to nine Bill uh nine uh was it billion or trillion uh let me check that real quick it was trillion yeah$8.9 trillion dollar is what the economy loses globally as a result of low Employee Engagement and that's a staggering number the reason I couldn't remember if it was billion or trillion is I can't really wrap my head around either number to be honest but $8.9 trillion or about 9% of global GDP um is is the economic impact of low employee Eng engagement and that's what this other section is here about uh the role of Economics uh and well-being but the third section of this report is really the part that I'm most interested in for the podcast and I suspect as listeners many of you are interested in the most and that's about management and uh you know heads up I'm going to have two very very uh loose political references here uh nothing partisan in this in this show of course but the first thing here is when I think about the role of the manager coming in this report which is that managers account for 70% of the variance that we see in Employee Engagement it takes me back to I think it was uh James car well James Carville is still around but James Carville was uh was uh one of the key guys in um Bill Clinton's 1992 race to become president president I believe it was back in the day and he said it's the economy stupid this makes me think it's the manager stupid you know it's not we don't have to overthink this the manager is the key to most things when it comes to how engaged and performant the workforce is it doesn't have to be rocket science right so part three in This Global report is really about the role of the manager so a few things come out of this section uh that I think you'll find very interesting first although managers are generally a little bit more engaged and more thriving than your average contributor if you want to characterize it that way um they are indeed experiencing more negativity than non-managers right they have um they have a lot more pressure generally speaking they're in between right they're they're that in between layer the middle management uh getting directives strategically from upper management and having to propagate information to contributors and perhaps managers below them it it's a challenge and they feel a lot of that uh back and forth and being pushed and pulled directionally and and a lot of those things and they're the messenger right when you think of don't shoot the messenger we know that managers are are really important in that in that recipe and they face a lot of stress as a result so again although managers are more engaged generally speaking and generally thriving more in life they are more likely to experience stress sadness loneliness and anger than non-managers in an organization and that's something to take note of I think this is important to recognize too because we've talked about it many times on the program but managers are so important to the well-being of employees who's there to support the managers and so managers are important to the organization at large because they often provide that support to employees they have a huge impact on your aage average employees mental health there was a study that came out a few years ago in 2022 talking about how your manager I think there is I did a podcast episode on this managers have the equivalent mental health impact on someone as their own uh uh partner so if an employee has a partner it's almost as likely that their manager would have as big of an impact on their emotional health their mental well-being as their own uh partner at home and if you think about that that's what people talk about at the dining room table right they talk about their managers what did their manager do today what is the manager deciding that impacts them for better for worse it's it's it's part of the reality right and so managers have a huge impact on employees because they provide that emotional support and that's a very important element to recognize here well when it comes to the managers again this idea it's the manager stupid right when you have engaged managers you have engaged employees that's what comes out of this report as well 70% of the varant variance excuse me in team engagement is related to the manager we can have strategy we can have Vision we can have Perks we can have work life work life balance we can have all these fantastic policies and all these fantastic structural elements to organizations but the fact of the matter according to this report is that well beyond any other Factor the manager is what impacts engagement at the organization on the employee level that is the real important part here and again it's not surprising people you know what's this the line agree or disagree people don't leave companies or they leave managers and that's really what this is trying to say I think now the third part about this section about managers is what they coin best practice organizations and in best practice organizations generally speaking 75% of their managers are engaged and that means that about 70% of their non-managers are engaged thinking back to this correlation we just talked about when a manager is engaged it's more likely that the employees are engaged when a manager is engaged in providing great support constant uh uh engagement with that employee constantly meeting providing feedback making sure everything's clear listening it's going to be more likely that you're seeing a high Employee Engagement score and so that's what's really interesting here are these three elements about the manager managers have more negative experiences which brings the idea to me that we need to make sure managers are getting support and training second engaged managers lead to an Engaged Workforce and third these best practice organizations which we all want to have 75% of their managers are engaged which leads to about 70% of their employees being engaged which one which once again supports that connection I just said early on in the program I was lucky enough to have a spring break trip and as part of that uh I was actually back to where I from where I grew up uh and saw a bunch of family as well and um a lot of people I was speaking with struggling with the uncertainty going on right now uh I heard talk about the tariffs not sure what to do with the tariffs it was impacting their businesses the layoffs going on right now particularly in Tech and the the fear that that has brought the the volatility and uncertainty and that that brings me to this idea perhaps of of my second political reference here which um I believe uh Ronald rean we we there was a term trickle down economics which uh which was not a positive term when thinking about uh Ronald Reagan's policy but the idea there was that by investing in the upper layer uh econom ically uh uh uh upper um wealthiest uh layer of Americans that that would trickle down into have positive impacts and again trickle down wasn't a positive term but when I think about trickle down uh impacts right it makes me think that based on these findings that investing in managers right now amidst all the uncertainty is what trickles down or trickles throughout or permeates throughout the rest of the organization that if you're going to invest in something it's really important to make sure that the managers are equipped that the managers are skilled that when you do this it will lead to higher productivity higher profitability lower absenteeism lower turnover but it's so easy to gloss over this idea that it's the manager is stupid right the middle management layer is the heartbeat of the organization and that is what influences the day-to-day doers in a company which ultimately enable the company to deliver on its Mission and purpose and I think that's something that gets overlooked quite a bit investing in those managers and that's why this program exists right is to help people sharpen their leadership skills and help people become better managers and that's what leadership Voyage is all about so a quick recap today about this Gallup state of the workplace state of the global workplace report there were three large buckets in this report and in the third one we focused we focused on three more specific areas so first the three large areas um mental health impacts right now of work or really how people are doing at work uh and in that part of pretty frustrating 20% of people experiencing loneliness second large bucket being about the economy and the impact that it had uh the impacts that some of these well-being uh elements have on the economy uh $9 trillion lost and then the third section of course about managers and inside of that manager agement part managers experiencing more negative having more negative experiences than non-managers engaged managers lead to engaged employees and the definition of this best practice organizations where you see 75% of managers engaged 70% of employees engaged and of course you don't achieve that without some investment you don't achieve that overnight without really thinking about how do I equip my management layer that heartbeat to the organization with something that's influential on the rest of the employees so that's my take on gallup's stateof the global workplace 2024 uh I look forward to next time uh with this new episode coming up about the highlights and low lights of uh interviewing process again feel free to drop me an email start your Voyage at gmail.com text me through the link in the uh show notes or um yeah I look forward to hearing from you and looking forward to this next episode coming up soon here in April on leadership Voyage until next time everybody take care[Music][Music]