PART THREE

ENERGY

The company is us. I mean myself and 100,000 other colleagues of mine. If we’re excited, knowing what we want to do, aligned, inspired, moving forward, learning, attracting better people than we are, all the time, [then] the company is moving in that direction. It’s progressing. It’s growing.

—Carlos Brito, CEO, AB InBev

No one ever washes a rental car.

Unless you feel real ownership—real connection—you will never devote the extra energy needed to make something better. The same is true in business. Unless your employees feel engaged, even inspired, by the work they are doing, they will not invest their discretionary energy in the company, its customers, or its success.

In this part of the book, we introduce the third factor affecting performance. As it turns out, organizational energy is the single most powerful factor we measured, raising the average company twenty-four points on the productivity index.

Energy is intangible, but we all know it when we see it. Engaged employees bring commitment and enthusiasm to their work and apply it to their jobs every day. Some companies’ cultures seem almost to generate energy. And high-energy organizations can accomplish amazing things. (Ever check out the “Best Places to Work” lists? Most of those companies deliver dramatically better financial results than others.) Engagement and a strong culture multiply the impact of your company’s two scarcest resources, time and talent. They allow you to punch above your weight, to accomplish more with less.

Chapter 6 focuses on engagement, which has been an intractable problem for most companies. Our survey found that the average company engages barely a third of its workforce and must put up with nearly a tenth who are actively dissatisfied. While we expected to see engagement correlated with productivity, we were surprised by two things. One was the size of the multiplier: engagement really makes a difference. The other was the gains that come from what our respondents saw as inspired employees. The survey indicates that inspired employees are 90 percent more productive than engaged employees, and more than twice as productive as employees who are merely satisfied.

Chapter 7 goes on to examine culture. A great culture creates employee energy; a toxic one destroys it. Think back to how you felt every time you started a new job or a new assignment. You were full of optimism about what you could accomplish. Some companies manage to sustain that kind of spirit through people’s entire careers. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities, and your energy builds over time as you work with other talented people to accomplish more than you thought possible. In other companies, alas, the new-employee spirit vanishes within weeks. Chapter 7 will show how the best companies’ cultures channel employees’ energy to achieve remarkable outcomes—and how you can reawaken that kind of culture in your company.