Engaging Employees: Unlocking Your Company’s Growth Potential
- Frederic Etiemble
- Mar 19
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Your company’s growth strategy is only as strong as the people executing it. Yet, leaders often create big plans while overlooking a critical factor: whether their employees are truly engaged and empowered to achieve these goals. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report 2024, organisations with highly engaged employees show 23% higher profitability. Unfortunately, only 25% of Australian employees report being engaged at work.
This article is part of our series, Where Are Your Growth Blind Spots?, where we explore the overlooked barriers hindering growth. Drawing from Vibrance’s Growth Orienteering strategic approach, we help leaders identify hidden obstacles. Our goal is to unlock each organisation’s full growth potential.
In this article, we focus on the employee blind spot. This obstacle arises when organisations fail to build trust, engagement, and empowerment among their workforce. It jeopardises the execution of growth initiatives and leaves untapped potential on the table.
The Cost of Disengagement: Understanding the Employee Blind Spot
Employees are an organisation’s most valuable asset. However, many organisations struggle to engage and empower their workforce effectively. The employee blind spot becomes evident when leaders overlook the importance of trust, autonomy, and meaningful collaboration. This oversight results in a workforce that feels disengaged and undervalued.
Signs of the Employee Blind Spot
The employee blind spot often manifests as:
A lack of trust between leaders and teams, resulting in micromanagement that stifles innovation.
Minimal collaboration due to silos and rigid hierarchies that hinder effective teamwork.
Neglecting talent development, which prevents employees from acquiring the skills and opportunities essential for contributing to growth.
The consequences are severe. Disengaged employees are less productive, less innovative, and more likely to leave. These factors undermine the organisation’s ability to implement successful growth strategies. Conversely, organisations prioritising trust, empowerment, and collaboration cultivate cultures where employees thrive, driving growth from within.
Trust: The Key to Unlocking an Organisation’s Growth Potential
Overcoming the employee blind spot requires a shift from a control-based model to a trust-based one. In a control-based environment, processes are designed to monitor employees closely. This often leads to unnecessary complexity and inefficiency.
A trust-based operating model assumes that employees are inherently capable and motivated to do the right thing. This approach integrates trust into the organisation’s processes, prioritising outcomes over micromanagement. By removing unnecessary control layers, organisations empower employees to take ownership of their roles. This fosters effective collaboration and meaningful contributions to shared goals.
Five Proven Approaches to Foster a Trust-Based Organisation
Shifting to a trust-based model isn’t easy. It demands leadership commitment and the adoption of new frameworks, tools, and methodologies. Leaders must model trust, demonstrate vulnerability, and create an environment where employees feel empowered to own their work. While this is a significant change, many organisations have successfully implemented these strategies. Here are five approaches organisations have used to build trust:
1. Servant Leadership: Empowering Over Controlling
Servant leadership emphasizes empowerment over control. Leaders act as enablers, eliminating barriers and granting autonomy to teams. By transitioning from a command-and-control to a coaching mindset, organisations create environments where employees feel valued and trusted.
Example: Best Buy, under Hubert Joly, successfully rebuilt trust during challenging times. Joly focused on employee empowerment, purpose-driven leadership, and decentralised decision-making. This approach restored trust, elevating employee engagement and improving financial performance.
2. Psychological Safety: Encouraging Open Dialogue
Research by Google found that psychological safety—the ability to take risks without fear—drives success. Organisations now prioritize creating environments where employees trust their voices will be heard.
Example: Novartis invests in psychological safety training for leaders, promoting open dialogue and innovation.
3. Radical Transparency: Sharing Information Openly
Radical transparency means openly sharing company decisions, financial data, and performance metrics. This fosters trust in leadership and develops a shared ownership among employees.
Example: Handelsbanken operates with high transparency and decentralised decision-making, allowing employees to make financial and operational choices.
4. Flexible Work & Autonomy-Based Models: Empowering Employees
Remote and hybrid work policies enhance trust when they prioritize autonomy rather than excessive monitoring. Companies allowing employees to structure their work show confidence in their teams, leading to greater commitment and accountability.
Example: Atlassian embraces flexible work policies that enhance autonomy, yielding high employee satisfaction and productivity.
5. Self-Management: Enhancing Employee Control
While not suitable for every organisation, self-management can significantly build trust by granting employees direct control over their work.
Case Study: Buurtzorg
Buurtzorg is a Dutch healthcare organisation that has transformed community nursing. Founded by Jos de Blok in 2006, Buurtzorg moved away from the traditional top-down model by establishing self-managed teams of nurses providing holistic care.
This model empowers nurses with full autonomy, focusing on patient well-being over bureaucratic constraints. Buurtzorg became a leader in self-management and trust-based design, evidenced by its own Harvard Business School case study.
In 2016, I met Nicole Koster at a conference in Melbourne. We discussed what happens when you really trust employees. Her talk on "humanity over bureaucracy" illustrated Buurtzorg’s remarkable methodology, showcasing how trust-based design fosters engagement and growth.
Buurtzorg’s essence lies in its self-managed teams, who operate autonomously. This trust-centric approach enables nurses to prioritize patient outcomes and adhere to professional standards.
The Impact on Growth
Founder Jos de Blok replaced control with trust, establishing a culture of engagement and innovation that fuelled Buurtzorg's expansion. Remarkably, Buurtzorg maintained its principles while scaling from one team to nearly 1,000 teams and 10,000 nurses in just ten years.
Though some may argue Buurtzorg’s model is uniquely suited to Dutch culture, the principles have inspired organisations across various sectors. The core lesson is that while every organisation need not emulate Buurtzorg's exact self-management model, trust-based approaches can unlock extraordinary growth potential when adapted thoughtfully.
The Reality Check for Leaders
Implementing these five approaches can be challenging. Many organisations face entrenched cultural barriers that complicate the adoption of trust-based models. Leadership teams often grapple with risk-averse stakeholders who prioritize predictability, shareholders demanding quick results, and middle management feeling threatened by shifts in power dynamics.
Moreover, years of operating under control-based models can create muscle memory that's tough to unlearn. The journey to becoming a trust-based organisation is rarely linear. Even the most dedicated leaders may encounter setbacks. What matters most is cultivating enough goodwill and momentum so that when leaders announce bold growth initiatives, employees are motivated to engage positively.
Overcoming the Employee Blind Spot
The employee blind spot lies in the gap between strategic ambition and execution capacity. When trust becomes a core organisational principle, employees shift from passive participants to active drivers of growth. They drive innovation, collaboration, and momentum that strategies alone cannot achieve.
The key question is not whether your employees can execute your growth plans. Instead, ask yourself: Have you created the conditions necessary for them to succeed? Have you built the trust that enables your team to fully commit to your vision?
Reflect on this: What significant move could your organisation make if every employee embraced your growth vision as passionately as you do?
About Fred
Executive advisor on strategy and innovation. Co-author of The Invincible Company, a guide to building resilience in organisations through corporate innovation. The book was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2021.
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