Want to improve employee engagement? Be more human

According to Gallup, 64-80% of employees globally are not engaged or actively disengaged. Assistant Professor Lyndon Garrett shares how reclaiming humanity at work could help employees thrive.

What can we learn from theatre performers, NFL players, and ballet dancers about the workplace?

Assistant Professor of Management Lyndon Garrett has studied performers in these three contexts and found they reveal important insights for employee engagement.

For decades, organisations have been searching for ways to improve engagement.

From financial incentives to workplace design, investing in workplace culture, and more recently, focusing on the ‘employee experience.’

Yet despite these initiatives, engagement rates remain low.

Global surveys over 50 years have shown that on average across industries, 64-80% of employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged.

Assistant Professor Garrett says these approaches aren’t addressing the most important question: ‘Why am I here?’

He argues the most important driver of work engagement is meaningfulness.

So, what makes work meaningful?

The four pillars of meaning

In her book, The Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith reviews the research on what gives people a sense of meaningfulness, and identifies four pillars of meaning:

Narrative

The first pillar of meaningfulness is Narrative. Assistant Professor Garrett says we experience meaning when our life feels like a good story.

“If I overcome odds, experience growth or some kind of significant change in my life, I feel a sense of meaning,” he said.

“I need to feel my life is unfolding in an interesting way.”

Purpose

The next pillar is purpose.

It’s the feeling that we’re contributing to some greater cause and serving something beyond myself.

It doesn’t need to be a grand purpose but can be found in any kind of work where you feel like your work matters.

Belonging

The third pillar is having a sense of belonging.

It’s having genuine social connections with other humans at work, or feeling part of a collective.

Assistant Professor Garrett explained, “I experience a sense of meaningfulness when playing board games with my family, even if there is no growth involved or no purpose other than just to play together.”

Transcendence

The final pillar of meaning is transcendence.

This is the meaningfulness we feel when an experience inspires a sense of awe, wonder and beauty.

"Examples include being in nature, listening to beautiful music, looking at art, or even watching a beautiful sports play unfold.”

Importantly, any of these pillars can provide a sense of meaningfulness at work. They do not all have to be satisfied at once.

And Assistant Professor Garrett argues that these pillars of meaningfulness are not unique to particular kinds of jobs, but can be found in virtually any job, if people are orienting toward these objectives.

Why aren’t employees finding meaning?

So if engagement is driven by having a sense of meaningfulness at work, and meaningfulness can be found in any job, what is stopping people from finding meaningfulness at work?

Assistant Professor Garrett explains that the reason people aren’t finding meaning is because workplaces are often dehumanising environments:

“When we show up to work, we feel less like a human and more like a cog in a machine just there to perform your role at work.”

Rigid role expectations can erode individuality, organisation socialisation diminishes our sense of self, competitive cultures weaken human connections, and performance pressure leads us to sacrifice our own wellbeing.

And when we stop seeing ourselves as human beings, we detach from our innate desires for meaningfulness. Our humanistic impulse to seek meaning gets replaced by organisational priorities that are attached to our roles.

What does this have to do with athletes, actors and dancers?

Assistant Professor Garrett studied three different worlds where common forms of dehumanisation were highly visible: theatre, the NFL, and ballet.

And in these three different environments, he witnessed how workers managed to reclaim their humanity in different ways.

NFL: From competition to humanised professionalism

One common form of dehumanisation is treating players as replaceable commodities by creating a hypercompetitive environment. This is very evident in the National Football League.

Assistant Professor Garrett found most players enter the NFL with a deep sense of meaningfulness around football. Then they are shocked by how different the values are in the NFL compared to playing football in college. The NFL encourages players to be individualistic, competitive with their teammates, and focused on earning money.

This leads many players to feel disenchanted and fall out of love with football in the first year.

But most players do not just accept this dehumanised approach to their work. Because while the league encourages individualism and competitiveness, they also experience humanising moments with their teammates—sharing meals, telling stories, playing cards, sharing their struggles--that remind them of their humanity.

These moments reanimate players’ desire to connect with and care for each other. So they actively resist the ideology of the league that says 'you’re just here to make money', instead adopting an approach Assistant Professor Garrett calls humanised professionalism, where they still try to compete as hard as they can, but at the same time helping the teammates they are competing with.

When they adopt this orientation, they rediscover the meaningfulness of their work and fall back in love with football.

Theatre: From rigid scripts to absorptive play

Another prevalent form of dehumanisation is rigidly scripted roles that restrict people’s autonomy, and few workplaces have more rigidly defined roles than the theatre, where actors must follow a scripted role and say the same lines night after night.

But in Assistant Professor Garrett’s study, he observed how in the rehearsal process, actors would frequently break out of their roles, making jokes, being playful, and laughing at their mistakes. They would also actively think about the intentions behind the lines, so that even though the words were not their own, they could feel a personal connection with the words they were saying.

The result of this approach was what Assistant Professor Garrett calls absorptive play, where actors stopped feeling like they were performing their roles in a mechanical way, and instead the role performance became a moment of play, even while still sticking to the script

Ballet: From performance pressure to adaptive perfectionism

Ballet was a context that Assistant Professor Garrett said was broadly toxic with multiple dehumanising pressures.

“They’re expected to be perfect with no room for mistakes, no speaking out, no questioning the director and no complaining when you’re hurt or feeling unwell.”

In these toxic environments, when dancers stop viewing themselves as human beings and instead view themselves as robots, the pursuit of perfectionism becomes self-destructive with dancers often pushing through injuries and starving themselves.

To get out of this spiral of toxic perfectionism, the dancers often had to get to a place of breakdown.

But the dancers who were able to recover and push past these breakdowns described experiencing cues from family members, fellow dancers and sometimes doctors that reminded them that they have agency, it’s okay if they make mistakes, and they need to prioritise their wellbeing. In other words, these cues reminded them that they are human.

When dancers internalised these rehumanising cues, they shifted from maladaptive perfectionism to adaptive perfectionism, still aiming for perfection in their performance, but with self-compassion when they made mistakes and caring for their wellbeing.

Putting these lessons into practice to increase employee engagement

Assistant Professor Garrett said rehumanising the workplace wasn't about removing constraints or making roles less scripted or competitive.

“It’s about changing the way people relate to themselves, their work and each other in the workplace.”

One of the most important responsibilities of leaders is to reaffirm employee’s humanity, especially as systems became more optimised for performance and AI exacerbates the focus on workplace efficiencies.

“The essence of humanistic management places human dignity and wellbeing at the centre of business decision making.“

Lyndon Garrett is Assistant Professor of Management and currently teaches Managing People and Human Capital at Melbourne Business School. To find out more about studying at Melbourne Business School, visit our Degree Programs and Short Courses pages, or learn about our range of services For Organisations.