Employee Engagement Lessons From Milwaukee

I’m not in Milwaukee. I’ve never been there. I know if it from the NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks and wasn’t ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Laverne And Shirley’ set there? I think the state of Wisconsin produces a lot of beer and cheese, judging from the football fans famous for wearing ‘cheese heads.’ But I did find an article from a Milwaukee newspaper about employee engagement.

It’s not Los Angeles or New York. It’s not even Auckland, population-wise at least. There’s lot of writing about engagement from the perspective of big city corporates. There’s even a lot (not surprisingly) written about engagement in China and India. Why wouldn’t there be? So, the Milwaukee article caught my eye, as it isn’t a big city and I don’t perceive it as being an especially corporate environment. (I think Laverne and Shirley worked for a massive  but it seemed pretty blue collar.) Harley-Davidson might be a big company but, again, it hardly radiates cliche corporate imagery.

A quick Wiki check tells me that its brewing fame is now historic. There’s only one left. There used to be four. That’s probably had an impact on employee engagement. According to the article, Milwaukee is pretty consistent with the rest of the working world.

“…29 percent of employees are fully engaged. Furthermore, 26 percent are considered disengaged. Disengaged employees are two and a half times more likely to leave their job for any level of pay increase than engaged employees… young employees and older groups are more engaged than middle-aged people, with engagement peaking among employees who have been at their place of employment for three to five years.”

Assuming Laverne and Shirley still had their jobs, they’d be well past peak engagement now.