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.