A disengaged employee doesn’t just coast. They cost you £14,280 a year.
During our recent Energised Teams, Real Results skills booster, Productivity Ninja Grace Marshall and Leadership Expert David Papa got straight to the point: when energy drops, performance follows. Not eventually. Immediately.
It’s an uncomfortable truth for anyone managing people right now. Gallup’s latest meta-analysis found that highly engaged teams see 23% higher profitability and 18% higher sales. That £14,280 figure comes from someone earning £42,000, roughly 34% of their salary, lost in disengaged output.
So why isn’t every leader obsessing over this?
Why don’t more leaders focus on engagement?
In the session, Grace and David named the real reasons engagement keeps getting pushed down the priority list, things like “too busy, not enough time,” confusion about what people actually want, and a lack of honest conversations about it.
You cannot pay someone into engagement, and you cannot logic someone into it either. It’s a personal, emotional process, and almost no leaders are ever trained in how to work with that.
The manager effect
Research shared in the session found that the manager accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement.
That number alone reframes the job. The most effective engagement strategy isn’t a new initiative; it’s equipping every manager with this skill.
The fear nobody names
A big part of the session focused on something most teams never say out loud: fear. Grace calls it “high-functioning fear”, the kind that looks like competence on the surface but is running the show underneath.
As Brené Brown puts it, leaders can either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or lose an unreasonable amount of time managing the unproductive behaviour that fear creates. There’s no third option where you just ignore it and it goes away.
Grace and David walked through what this actually looks like in a team, and the shift that turns fear into curiosity. That’s one of the bits worth watching in full.
Want the full picture?
We’ve only scratched the surface. The full skills booster covers the four key elements for building thriving teams, the neuroscience of trust, and how to handle the awkward conversations most managers avoid.
👉 Watch the full recording of Energised Teams, Real Results here:
If you’d like to bring this into how your managers lead day to day, our Cracking the Engagement Puzzle and Thriving Teams workshops go deeper still. Get in touch with our team, we’d love to help.
