What’s Wrong With India

Gallup analysts reported this week that only 8% of the Indian workforce is “engaged” while 60% is not engaged and 32% is actively disengaged. We added several of our Q12 employee engagement questions to our annual survey in India to figure this out.

This is in a critical emerging economy -- whose GDP growth has been slowing down in recent years.

My analysis is that leaders in the country are probably naming the wrong people managers. No other explanation makes sense. Indians are great people, peaceful, loving, inspired, and incredibly hard-working. But they aren’t maximizing their potential when they show up at work. This is true even at successful companies.

Gallup has found that almost everything negative or positive in a workplace comes back to the manager. In India’s case, that terribly low engagement number is caused by too many managers with no talent or too many managers working on the wrong things with the right people.

India’s problem also goes beyond bad managers. I’m certain that widespread corruption plays a role. You can imagine what it does to meritocracy in the workplace when corruption and cronyism are big parts of how business is conducted.

In fact, Gallup’s global polling shows that India’s citizens believe both business and government are corrupt. This feeling is exacerbated by the traditional heavy-handed, command-and-control management style and extremely hierarchical practices. Also, a thick bureaucracy of paperwork and forms takes the fun out of work, making it boring and meaningless.

India has to do something about these problems quickly, as Gallup finds a whopping 31% of the population rate their lives poorly enough to be considered “suffering.” That’s more than triple the reported suffering from just five years ago.

In comparison, U.S. suffering runs 3-4%, even in these difficult times, and workplace engagement runs right at 28%. Gallup’s best clients run workplace engagement above 50% -- including India’s Taj Hotels. So, high numbers are attainable.

If the leadership of India wants to seriously address disengagement and suffering, they would make one big command decision to turn the whole country into a “strengths-based nation.” Every single worker and manager would take the StrengthsFinder assessment. This would enable all of them to tap into their innate talents and achieve greater success -- making them more engaged in their work.

How about this: A new national requirement that “every working and nonworking Indian will know their strengths, including the managers.” And run every manager in the whole country through great-manager training. And measure the results by continuously tracking employee engagement.

These moves would move India forward -- revving up its economy, its companies, and its workforce.