As the English football team returns home with their tail between their legs, you can hear a collective sigh of relief from most of us tortured fans. We no longer have to go through the anguish and frustration that is watching a team of individually talented (and very highly paid!!) footballers fail to gel as a team.  The World Cup has yet again reminded me of how important teamwork and peer support are in driving success.  The anxiety felt by the millions of England supporters on sofas and in pubs everywhere is probably a similar anxiety employees have felt with all the cuts, layoffs and change companies have been going through over the past 2 years—a sense that everyone is looking out for number one and not each other.

So how are engagement levels faring as we start to see the first green shoots of recovery in the economy? I took a look at CLC Human Resources’ engagement survey across over 145 organizations and 204,000 employees worldwide and picked out a couple of trends that show that we’re not out of the woods yet:

• Engagement is still at risk—With 21.6% of employees in the “disengaged” category, it’s clear that this is a problem with real roots. The low levels of discretionary effort coupled with high levels of intent to stay are causing very real performance issues for a lot of companies.
• Customer service employees are hit hardest in the recovery—While disengagement among sales employees is falling as the recovery starts to take hold, the opposite is true for customer service employees.  In the period between Q1 2009 and Q1 2010, this group’s disengagement has increased by approximately 12%—most of which occurred in the final quarter of that period.
• Low levels of trust in leadership causes drag on engagement—Employee trust in leadership has eroded significantly in 2010. A quarter of employees don’t trust leaders to make the right decision in times of uncertainty, and 20% don’t believe that their leadership is honest and ethical.  As Maritz research shows, this low trust can cause a damaging blow to companies, given the impact of low trust on attrition and emotional engagement with work.

Our research on employee mobilization showed just how important the communications environment is for driving employee performance and productivity.  Communicators must focus on enabling and supporting better communication within our organization rather than simply pushing more messages out there. Check out the Council’s resources around line manager dialogue training, enabling more effective peer-peer communication through internal social media, and resources on adapting the function to a more enabling role.

What are you seeing within your own organizations? Have you done cuts of your engagement data by different employee populations? Are there any trends that you are particularly focused on?