I think we have a bit of a sustainability crisis that is “hiding” in plain sight. I remember when I started working in and around the area of employee engagement (we didn’t call it that then) over ten years ago. I felt in my gut and could show anecdotally that there was a relationship between how people felt about their work and the organization they worked for and how they performed.

I started experimenting with a model I would later call Compliance to Commitment and managing whole people and I was pleased to see that my instincts were correct, improving people’s alignment and hiring better and treating them better effected our bottom line, health care expenditures and a bunch of other things.

I was thrilled a couple of years ago to encounter data from prestigious consulting firms like Gallup, Towers Watson, BlessingWhite, and others that had conducted surveys and research and could draw definitive conclusions with objective numbers- significant numbers.

In late 2008 BlessingWhite conducted an international survey that pegged high engagement at less than 30 percent of organizations worldwide. They also showed the relative disparity of high versus low engagement on key performance indicators like productivity, profitability, and sustainability.

Other studies show that turnover costs us about $5 trillion per year in the U.S alone, and “presenteeism” another $200 billion annually. It is estimated on the health care side that depression alone costs us $40 billion in direct and indirect costs. In 2010 health care expenditures consume 16% of GDP, with that number continuing to escalate. Sixty percent of health issues are attributable to lifestyle, not heredity. The latest numbers are worse. A 2010 study by Towers Watson says that high engagement has slipped to twenty percent worldwide. As Gary Hamel of the London School of Economics says, “this is the biggest productivity crisis since we created the industrialized world”.

I am concerned about this engagement gap. I am concerned that when I look at most of the interventions I see in health care reform they are about health care delivery, not health. We aren’t engaging the patient/consumer. We also aren’t looking at models of employer/employee/provider collaboration; we are looking at who pays. I don’t think we can “sustain” this.

My research tells me that shortly we will have a situation where there is more demand for “experienced” workers than there is supply. My research also tells me that we are running out of places to “outsource” to avoid dealing with these issues. Developing countries are getting smarter, they don’t want to just provide Western based conglomerates with cheap labor and new markets; they want their own robust economies.

The other reason I think we might have a hidden “sustainability crisis” is when I see comments on places like LinkedIn talking about how the field of Human Resources is now or rapidly becoming obsolete because we have “systems” that can do recruitment and selection and PEO’s or “professional employer organizations” who can manage all those pesky little administrative details like compliance and payroll. I think those folks must have missed Hamel’s comments….

One of the things I like about sustainable enterprises is the idea that we need to look at things from a systemic and societal way. We need to examine the long term effects of our actions and the “footprint” we leave, positive or negative. I guess I am just wanting to put the stake in the ground that when we concern ourselves with the environment and sustainability that we concern ourselves with the sustainability of the human spirit as well.

I have discussed previously the concept of congruence. Congruence aligns your values and the values of the people you invite to join your organization. It is pretty important, especially when you track why people leave or are asked to leave organizations. It is rarely about technical competency.

Stephen M.R. Covey, or Covey Jr., as I like to refer to him talks about the speed of trust, and how in many cases we are paying a trust tax rather than earning a trust dividend. The elements of trust according to Covey are credibility and behavior. Credibility is made up of competency or skills and character or values. As a society we focus a lot on competency and not enough on character and behavior- that is why we are paying an 80% trust tax in the form of low or disengagement in my opinion.

Daniel Pink, in his book Drive- The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, says that after we have passed through security and survival most of us seek mastery, autonomy, and purpose. I think he may be on to something there. Are we building it into our employment relationships?

If personal health and wellness can contribute significantly to individual and organizational health care expenditures and let us “re-distribute” some of the health care dollars and slow down the effect on GDP isn’t that a form of sustainability?

How about if we re-capture some of that $5.2 trillion we are losing to turnover and presenteeism? Doesn’t that have a sustainability element?

Hamel and I agree that our industrial models took away much of our personal competence through the creation of systems that fostered corporate and organizational codependency that we are now paying for in the form of dis-engagement and lost productivity and increased health care expenditures. We also eroded some of the human spirit.

So I guess I would like to leave you with the thought about how your sustainability efforts relate to people inside and outside your organization. It would seem to me that if you can incorporate concepts like congruence, purpose, and autonomy into your business practices you can enjoy that trust dividend and that is very good for your business. And if we can build into our society one person, one company, one community at a time that would be a very good thing for all of us…..