E252 | The Science of Engagement and Successful Management with Jim Harter

This week we learned from the Chief Workplace Scientist at Gallup, Jim Harter. Jim is also the co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Wellbeing at Work and the No. 1 Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, It's the Manager. Now, he’s written another book, Culture Shock, where he explores how organisations adapting to this culture shock will determine whether they thrive or even survive and whether U.S. and global productivity will go up or down.

Jim has been studying human behaviour in organisations for 37 years and really gets a kick out of studying what happens inside them. His work at Gallup is to study what happens in the populace at large and to do massive polls of the world and workplaces around the world and understand what's going on in people's work and lives. Last year, Gallup did a daily survey throughout COVID, and fifteen thousand people take part in their quarterly survey, so they got some fantastic data. That’s why we wanted to invite Jim to The Melting Pot to find out what that data said about working from home versus being fully remote, or hybrid.

In this episode, we learned how many days in the office drive engagement. Also, do higher levels of engagement translate into better financial performance? How do we make business more productive and outperform our competitors? We also dig into the data about working from home versus in the office, and we find out what are the five things that drive wellbeing as humans, how to structure one-to-one meetings, and how often they should be. And finally, what are the top five things that we should talk about with our teams every week to drive high levels of engagement.

An absolutely fantastic conversation. Download and listen to learn more.

On today’s podcast: