No one wants to admit they’re a statistic

We woke this morning to a new article from Gallup - 1 in 5 workers are lonely, and it’s even higher for younger and remote workers. But, the good news is engagement with work, improving performance and all the things businesses need from employees addresses this loneliness (Gallup, 2024) (And that’s good for business 😉).

Everywhere we look, empirical and anecdotal data like this 👆 suggests businesses everywhere have a problem that people are having a terrible time with work and it’s costing businesses. Disengagement costs $8 trillion globally (Gallup, 2024). Work is not working.

Playgrounded is facing a business problem. Statistics don’t lie, but we rarely meet a leader who is willing to admit that they might be part of those statistics. There have to be leaders who think their people and teams are fine, and working effectively, but they are not.

Start ups like ours have to work on our pitches to different audiences. We are super confident in why we exist - work is not working and businesses are wasting time and money because they’re not implementing what we believe are simple, minimal time investments regularly that we can help with to improve engagement, collaboration and innovation. The economic reasons are there and sound.

What we’re still playing with is how to pitch, message and engage the individuals who have the impact to make change in organisations that we can help.

The human element of pressures that come with being a founder or leader with ambitions and opinions on how to build culture rarely leave space for admitting that there are systemic issues at play that may need addressing ASAP. Asking for help seems to be a blocker, particularly in the market we’re working in now where money is tight and futures are uncertain.

If you’re a leader looking at these statistics thinking that can’t possibly be me, we challenge you to open your mind and go in curious. If it’s been a while since you’ve asked your teams about their experience of work, ask some open ended questions to better understand where you can make an impact.

We have a few suggestions on what you could try:

Gather qualitative data in conversations… but we suggest you give your team some time to think about what they’d like to bring to the conversation ahead of time. A message like this could help:

Hey team, I’m really interested in your experience of work and how we can make work better together. This week in our 1:1s I’ll. be asking you what’s getting in the way of working, what your’e enjoying about work, what' you’re finding difficult.

Just by asking these questions, you’re going to be part of the way there in addressing loneliness at work. If you only get engaged responses back, asking the questions is a great way to keep watering the engagement plant 🪴

If you want to go on a data collecting exploration to help you better understand where you can put some impactful effort into your leadership, try our boundary worksheet.

And, if you want more empirical data on your own organisation, you could try running an engagement survey. Our friends at Culture Amp have some great options 😊 They also have this fancy calculator that can show you exactly how much money your organisation is wasting on not address disengagement with work.