Remember the fable about the grasshopper who fiddles away his summer while the ant stores up food for the winter? Well, it turns out ants may not be such devoted workers after all.
George Jacob, a content architect at PeopleMetrics, creators of customer centric software, stumbled across research that indicates ant colonies may resemble many workplaces. Of the ants the researchers defined as workers, they found that:
• More than 7 in 10 (72 percent) were inactive at least half the time they were observed
• One-fourth were never seen working
• Less than 3 percent of the ants were always active
“The sad reality is those numbers don’t feel too far off base for a disengaged workforce,” Jacob says. But there is hope.
Independent research shows that customer focus plays a role in employee engagement. Employee satisfaction surveys show that two-thirds of employees in a customer-centric culture are engaged, and one in four is fully engaged.
“Want to know the biggest, brightest difference between the anthill and the workplace?” Jacob asks. “We can ask each other what’s wrong, and then we can work together to fix it.”
