Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing and helping teams and organizations, create better working experiences in service of better

results. I really do believe to my core that how we experience our work has a tremendous impact

on the quality and creativity of what we deliver.

Like, our employee experiences have a hard and direct impact on business results.

My intuition on this is really strong.

But do you know what organizations don't love relying on exclusively?

Uh, that would be my or anyone's intuition. So luckily, but

maybe also a little bit sadly, I have some hard data to back my point of view here.

Gallup is one of those institutions whose research I follow most closely. They're pretty

dominant in the employee engagement space, and they just released

their 2023 State of the Global Workplace Report. And here are a few things I think are worth

knowing. First, according to their research, only 23% of the population is currently thriving

at work, while 59% are not engaged and 18% are actively

disengaged. Second, their researchers estimate that low engagement costs the global economy

about $8.8 trillion annually. And third, because these things should always be stated in threes, these not engaged or

disengaged employees are struggling very deeply with connection, feeling disconnected from

team and workplace. I've thought and talked a lot about connection over these past few years.

I've watched it fray. And I've heard from clients

over and over in this new world of work that we can't seem to figure this one out. How can we

start to rediscover a feeling of connection at work? And so I've started asking around, like just

asking people in my world. If remote working isn't doing it, but also

...