Almost a fifth of UK employees believes they are completely unaligned with their businesses’ mission.
A report found 15 per cent of UK workers feels unaligned with their company. This is according to Slack’s ‘State of Work Report’. Slack is a US cloud-based organisation that offers team collaboration software tools and online services.
Slack found that one in 10 global knowledge workers believe they are unaligned, this represents on a global scale, 38.5 million knowledge workers who feel they are dispassionate towards their company. A knowledge worker, are those whose main capital is knowledge, such as programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, public accountants and lawyers.
Within this group of workers, only 34 per cent feel teams work towards a shared vision. Out of employees who feel aligned, 70 per cent of them either “agree” or “strongly agree” that they would like to feel more aligned with their company’s vision.
Saadia Zahidi, head of education, gender and work and a member of the executive committee at the World Economic Forum said:
It is about being able to work and relate with your teams in a different way. It is about building an inclusive workplace culture. It is about active listening and more flat team structure.
The difference between aligned and unaligned workers can have a big impact on a business. Unaligned workers in the UK are three times more likely than aligned workers to expect “significant decline” in their company’s revenue and growth.
Where as aligned workers are twice as likely to expect “significant growth” in their company’s revenue.
However, the report also states that aligned workers are inundated with work. Aligned workers are likely to have 10 or more meetings a day, with 64 per cent of them spending 30 minutes or more on apps relevant to their occupation.
Sheena Iyengar, S.T. Lee professor of business in the management department at Columbia Business School said:
The cost of choice and information overload is that people get distracted, people are making more errors because they’re multitasking, and if you’re not giving yourself the time to focus, you are less good at engaging in creative problem-solving.
The research for Slack’s report was collated with the market research firm, GlobalWebIndex, who surveyed 17,000 global knowledge workers, managers and executives.
Darius is the editor of HRreview. He has previously worked as a finance reporter for the Daily Express. He studied his journalism masters at Press Association Training and graduated from the University of York with a degree in History.