The COVID-19 pandemic thrust the world into navigating the largest “work from home” experiment of modern times. Realistically, it is the largest work disruption of any time since Henry Ford designed his first production line. There is no denying that the COVID-19 virus is a large-scale human heartache, a health care crisis, and an economic tragedy. It raged across the globe, spreading sickness, death, and displacement. The double whammy impact on lives and livelihood hit many. The millions unemployed created a new reality overnight, and many of those jobs will not be coming back. Whole industries will have been destroyed, disrupted, or dislocated. Still others changed at speeds never seen before. Some have and will prosper. Perhaps not the masses.

While the threat of automation replacing jobs was the focus of much anxiety over the past decade or so, it proved to be a disease that did the most damage, most rapidly. We all saw how quickly the economy halted, the health care system faltered, people were furloughed or, worse, simply laid off as businesses shuttered closed. The world suffered a global crisis and responded with a country-by country, industry-by-industry, company-by-company, plan. The word remote punctuated management conversations, websites, podcasts, and blogs the world over. As the crisis unfolded, discussions ranged from “How do we cope?” and “How do we cut costs?” to “How do you lead?” and “How do you lead remotely?”

The Times, They Are a-Changin’

As the COVID-19 pandemic continued to unfold, a new reality set in and it became more difficult to predict an end. Financial modeling became increasingly difficult and cash preservation developed into the daily norm. The words no spend policy became commonplace for many firms.

Many discussions also addressed the issue of change. “We have changed more in a few weeks than in 10 years,” said Tesco CEO Dave Lewis as supermarkets needed to step up into essential services. Others said they'd seen 6 years of change in 6 months. Larry Rosen, CEO of Harry Rosen Inc., the Canadian luxury men's clothier, flatly admitted, “We took a whole bunch of guys like me – I'm 64 – and they learned how to shop online during this crisis.”

The rate of change accelerated by this virus had a fundamental impact on many workplaces and it provided a crisis playbook to better engage organizations, one we must learn from and carry over to postpandemic times.

Changing Your Advantage

As CEO of Proudfoot, a management consulting company founded in 1946, I too felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We had spent our history proud of our “boots on the ground” business model, our people shoulder to shoulder with clients, working through their improvement programs and major transformations to realize large-scale results, coaching new behaviors and implementing new processes and systems, not just advising from a distance. We told our clients, If you go underground we go underground, if your business has a night shift we work night shift. Well, that all stopped when the pandemic hit. Some assignments were paused as people zoomed their way home. We quickly switched to remote work. Where remote was not an option, our revenues paused. Suddenly, our competitive advantage nearly killed us. My goal was to save as many jobs as possible and maintain the business continuity where that was a possibility. We continued with projects that allowed it and were safe for our teams. We helped our clients navigate through with COVID-19 response planning, sometimes for free, because that was the right thing to do, and other times deferring their payments to the next year, to prevent them from deferring their improvement and transformation programs when they needed it most.

I was also conscious of the health and well-being of my people. Having been one of the early COVID-19 victims in February after three trips to New York as well as France and the UK, I knew what the virus could do. While I was lucky (its impact stopped at what I compared to a very bad flu bug turn into pneumonia), I recall getting out of bed three nights in a row wondering if I would be able to continue breathing. It was early in the pandemic. I didn't realize I could die. Later, the experience allowed me to understand its potential, and therefore I treated it with great respect. This disease was a killer for some, but it was not so bad for me. I was sick but lucky.

Great Things Happen at the Intersection of People and Technology

Both the firsthand business impact and the impact on my health allowed me to realize the empathy you needed during this time for your own people but also for your clients and customers. It also made me focus on the big picture – I needed my teams to feel as safe as they could, and we as a business needed them to remain engaged. This would not be something to navigate through alone. We doubled down on something we call HeadsUp and 1.5.30, a simple but meaningful global movement we kicked off with a rallying cry of “great things happen at the intersection of people and technology,” to remind people to prioritize human connection as a way to better engage with their teams, their communities, and society. 1.5.30 is a quick, once-a-day check-in (1), a once-a-week progress chat (5), and a once-a-month development and coaching conversation (30). HeadsUp refers to people lifting their heads from their devices to actively engage and focus on people. At the time we launched HeadsUp, we had no idea a global pandemic would slam the world's doors shut and create a societal need for a HeadsUp movement. As a backstory, we picked the unusual launchpad of Singapore in 2019 to unveil HeadsUp. After all, Singapore is one of the most digitally fluent and innovative countries on the planet, but also, according to a recent Qualtrics study, was one of the laggards in employee engagement.¹ When COVID-19 hit and much of the world went home, HeadsUp was more than relevant. We knew we needed to all remain HeadsUp. We needed to ensure that people lifted their noses out of their technology and connected with other people, albeit through technology when they went remote. But while it is labeled remote, feeling remote was the last thing people wanted during this time. After all, remember what you don't do when you work from home: you don't commute. You don't stop and grab coffee on the way to work. You don't stop and say hi to your colleagues at the office kitchen, in the locker room, or on the shop floor. You don't get the human contact you previously enjoyed. You may also be working on your kitchen table, balancing your laptop on one knee while bouncing your baby on the other knee. It's different. After the novelty wore off, we needed to be prepared for the new routine of the new reality. People saw that they needed to better engage. HeadsUp became a vehicle.

Fast forward past the height of the global pandemic, and HeadsUp becomes a mindset dedicated to encouraging better leadership at every level, irrespective of where people work. It's about developing leaders who prioritize connecting with people and human interaction in order to achieve their aspirations and build extraordinary businesses and communities. Great leaders know how to leverage technology to do that. This is a global need in the workplace, at home, and in society in general. HeadsUp is one of many tools that enable you to manage to engage.

Today, HeadsUp is both a business and a social movement. How effectively we do this now will determine how effectively our people, teams, and organizations not only come out of this period but how they show up in the future. Our wellness will depend on it. Our next-generation leaders will follow on from it. Our engagement will hinge on it.

Flat as a Pancake – Not Yet

While the past decade has flattened the organization structure and reduced the need for some managers, the need to create leaders at every level, particularly frontline leaders, has never been more necessary. Whether teams work from home or not. You need leaders not to command and control, but to create a sense of community, convene collaboration, engage people in their work, enable them to achieve their results, and energize them to coach and guide their teams, so that everybody can get up the next day and do it all again, and with gusto. So they will connect and engage.

We need to build engagement into the lifeblood of a leader's role, a performance requirement. The problem? Leaders have been ill-equipped to engage, not knowing the right tools to employ or the right approaches to take. After all, so much is coming at them. How can they stop and engage?

But What if They Could?

There is a way. Leaders often see engagement as the outcome rather than the launchpad to build stronger ecosystems and achieve results. Manage to Engage addresses this with simple concepts you will learn about like HeadsUp and the HeadsUp High Five (Presence, Vision, Tech Savvy, Coaching, and Influence), behavior models like active management, and the unique performance improvement tool that engages as much as it brings about improvement and change: 1.5.30.

These are the fundamental tools you'll find in this book, positioned in an engagement framework based on a new scorecard of 2 Fs and 7 Cs – the MI-9 triggers of engagement. Packed with tools and exercises to apply, the scorecard has you addressing performance improvement through the lens of engagement, and I hope energizes you to manage to engage.

But let's stop for a moment and think about where organizations were long before the COVID-19 crisis hit. Before the global financial crash of 2007–2008, we already had a crisis: a people crisis. Surveys the world over reported high levels of underengagement. In fact, almost two-thirds of most workforces around the world were in neutral at work, neither engaged nor disengaged. Then when financial panic set in, they clung to their positions out of necessity, not interest. A decade on, little had improved. We were relying on those same emotionally disconnected people to execute our business strategies. We knew this epidemic of discontent was hardly going to drive innovation in disrupted, highly competitive markets but we still had no solution.

Then a more literal epidemic hit: the COVID-19 pandemic. And the world changed again. This time on a massive global scale. Trust in leaders, business, and institutions was already at an all-time low as we entered the COVID-19 crisis. The virus gave trust an extra kick in the pants. And that neutral workforce either remained in neutral, disengaged, or if you were lucky, engaged to help save their organizations. Still others became essential workers – everyday bus and train drivers, delivery people, grocery store workers, and of course our health care workers. They all became heroes. The question we then needed to ask was, “How would we treat them postpandemic? Could we engage them for the long term to help build back better?”

People Are (Still) the Future of Business

We won't recover this time with the same approaches we used coming out of previous crises. This time a radical transformation is needed. We all know people are the future. But this time we need to prove it. Not just unlocking their potential for the company's sake, but allowing people to bring their best selves to work. This demands something new of managers, something that also needs to be measured differently – something more engaging. This book, I hope, will lead you through some suggestions on both.

Prior to COVID-19, a revolution was unfolding at work. People felt we had curtailed the drive to be the best we can be in the pursuit of quarterly results or improved productivity; their organizations had become shackles. People were underengaged. They had not quite self-organized into engagement movements, or anti-management rallies, to oust what they perceived as poor leadership, but the many were growing less tolerant of the few. They may not have taken to the streets yet; they suffered in silence. It didn't mean the urge wasn't there. It's just that they hadn't yet found a way to topple these flawed corporate regimes that did little to inspire us. We had not quite figured out how to rise for a cause. But things were changing. Companies were struggling to find or keep skilled people. People were voting with their feet.

A Moment Can Become a Movement

We're talking about whole workplaces of people and large populations of industries who weren't really there. We were not moving people to do anything special. Is it any wonder that McKinsey touted a change failure rate of 70–80 percent? And according to a Gallup survey, some 60–70 percent of the workforce is underengaged, and, worse still, on average, some 15 percent are disengaged.² Does this actually mean we are operating at 20–30 percent of our people capacity?

And then came a pandemic that changed everything. For better and for worse, business models changed. Operating models changed. Our office space changed. Businesses proved they could create new shift structures, change our health and safety protocols, send large portions of work to people's homes. Even the people whom just weeks prior we pointed to as “difficult to change” changed. The pandemic showed the resilience of people, the hidden heroes among our everyday workers who stepped up. The people we sadly often didn't think about kept our economies, our businesses, our communities, and our homes safe, secure, and with meals on our tables.

We can't waste the moment. It must become a movement. We must remember the sheer force of change that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. And to do that, we cannot let our workplaces slip back into the underengaged, underenthused leaders and teams from where we came.

Imagine what you could do if you flipped the formula. What if 85 percent were engaged? Imagine your productivity, your profitability, and growth. Imagine the challenges your teams would show up to solve? Imagine the world we could create.

Unless these chronically low levels of employee engagement prepandemic, are addressed, the world's economies surely cannot recover, and transformation failure rates will remain as low. Perhaps plummet further. With these statistics, you surely won't achieve the results you want or need in your improvement programs, let alone the transformations you now need to achieve. And now, with people likely fearing the loss of their jobs even more, their neutral feelings about work will provide little foundation to grow from.

But Does It Have to Be This Way?

As we cycle from recessions to tight labor markets and back again, it's clear that engagement still underpins business success. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us this. How you survive recessions, attract talent, achieve results, and keep your workplace safe are all impacted by engagement. Management practices stand to have the greatest impact on engagement. Better still, those that achieve high engagement have a competitive advantage.

So, how do I manage to engage? That's the real question for leaders today. How do I move from a moment like this, a great global reboot, to a positive movement where people volunteer to engage?

You'll notice I used reboot and not reset. It's an important difference in intent. Reset feels too much like it would be OK to go back to the default setting of old – old management models and processes, old organization structures and behaviors, rather than lean forward into a reboot. When you install new software on your computer you are asked to reboot, not reset. The difference? Your computer cycles through a restart but starts up better than when you shut down. New value is created.

So, how do we create that sense of volunteerism we saw in the height of the pandemic, in a postpandemic world of bipartisanism, fear, and distrust?

What Will Our Legacy Be?

We are at a time in business history where leaders at every level, the people who manage the business day to day, stand to have the greatest impact on their business survival and growth, by how they themselves show up and engage – how they build a better business for people. A new people reality.

We even heard the World Economic Forum at Davos 2020 (prior to the global pandemic): “With the world at such a critical crossroad, this year we must develop a Davos Manifesto 2020 to reimagine the purpose and scorecards for companies and governments,” espoused Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum.³ The Business Roundtable announced similar statements in August 2019 on the Purpose of a Corporation. It was signed by 181 CEOs who committed to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. All of these statements require full engagement. They require leaders to manage to engage.

Is It Culpability or Capability?

During the pandemic, we already saw that things could be different. Creativity was delivered. Innovation accelerated. People stepped up. Logistics, online retailers, tech firms, health care, food and beverage, and transport found varying degrees of success. But in others we retrenched people and reduced costs. Hospitality, airlines, bricks and mortar anything. Many employees pointed the finger squarely at management and leadership and how they navigated through the pandemic. Others understood that their industries were casualties of a pandemic more than management. But all asked, “Where is this multi-stakeholder capitalism now?”

It is here we need to start. This is where the tone and mood are set at work.

You could think it was a straight leadership problem, poor leadership, but as the world continues to change so rapidly and with so much coming at leaders today, it becomes more a question of developing capability rather than assigning culpability. Are we developing our leaders effectively? Do we have the right tools and approaches for today's workforce? Are our workplaces free of the noise that prevents engagement, the politics that stops it in its tracks?

With the best intentions, many managers struggle to engage their people because they don't lay the foundations for a safe, productive workplace. Leaders struggle to free themselves up to think about how their organizations could be better built to engage.

We know how we manage and lead has a direct effect on how people feel at work. We know that people quit people more than their jobs. We also know that when your systems, processes, and workplace doesn't support you, frustration takes the place of enthusiasm and the camel's back is broken by the last straw that was hanging on to engagement. We switch off, we quit, or worse still, we quit and stay.

So, what if you could bring a different mindset to engagement and apply new tools and approaches to help you enable people to engage? This is not about perks and prizes. As managers and leaders, we have an opportunity each day, each time we interact with people, to change their world of work for the better. Sometimes with small tweaks in how we connect or how our workplace connects with us, other times with large-scale change. All find their roots in engagement. All are necessary now more than ever. We will not build the businesses we all want to work for, the ones people will feel passionate about rethinking, reinventing, and rebooting, until we do.

Engagement, the Quiet Revolution, the Needed Movement

What if we cast a brighter spotlight on the current workplace crisis? It isn't right, nor appropriate, that so many feel so disconnected from something that consumes the best part of our lives: our jobs. And in times of mass unemployment, it's also not right to rely on a loose labor market to motivate people to bring their best selves to work.

Untapped people power is the greatest access to competitive advantage we have ever had. Tap into it and you have the greatest uncapped advantage to leverage of all time.

It is completely possible to make a difference to those around you by the way we manage and lead. So, this is a call to action for the people who manage teams at every level. From the front line to the top dogs. We need to change the way we engage – at a very fundamental level – and this means to manage in order to engage. A reality check is long overdue. We need a reminder of the impact of our workplaces on our wellness, our lives. Our work fills our brains so we can't relax or sleep, affects our health, our happiness, our relationships, our friendships, and our financial security. Underengagement costs us emotionally, personally, and financially. Our engagement levels come with a measurable price tag. This is an economic need, a societal necessity, a quality-of-life issue bigger than any problem business faces today. It affects how we restart from pandemics, bounce back from recessions, deliver our improvement programs, and transform our organizations and cultures. It drives the results of our companies as well as our personal welfare and life satisfaction. Addressing this situation is the greatest change project for the twenty-first century. It propels everything from innovation to survival, and it needs to start now.

We must feel engaged in our jobs. We should be enthused, not jaded; fulfilled, not drained. We are truly “in it together.”

How to Engage with This Book

In this book, I zero in on how you can engage your people better, and along the way, I discuss the vital insights that can be applied to your transformation and improvement programs as well.

Here is a summary of the chapters to follow and the tools you might consider taking to your workplace, to better engage.