Ryan Englin on Experience Leadership: How Low Engagement Drains 8% of Your Revenue And How to Stop It

I sat down with Marc Haine on Experience Leadership to talk about why disengagement is the silent killer of revenue in ops-heavy businesses and what owners can do to fix it.

Marc opened with a stat from Gallup's State of the Workplace report: close to 80% of the workforce is not actively engaged in their jobs. And disengagement drains up to 8.4% of revenue every year. You don't write a check for it. You don't feel it leave your account. But it's gone. In construction, where a 10% margin makes you king, that number alone means you could double your profitability just by focusing on engagement. Your people are not a cost center. They are a profit center.

We talked about the myth that won't die. "Nobody wants to work." I don't pull punches on this one. It's not that nobody wants to work. They just don't want to work for you. And if that stings, good. Sit with it. Because there are plenty of people out there who want good jobs, career paths, and companies that invest in them. When you become that company, you don't have a hiring problem anymore. You have people fighting to stay.

I walked Marc through the real cost of hiring anyone with a pulse. A players want to play on A teams. Every single time. When you keep bringing in people who don't fit your culture, who don't think like your team, who don't belong, you create a fragmented group that drains the energy of your best performers. Your A players aren't declining. The C's and D's you keep hiring are pulling them down.

We spent a lot of time on middle management because that's where the symptoms of disengagement show up first. When your supervisors are saying "I don't have enough time" and blaming their teams for every problem, that's a red flag. They're too busy putting out fires their team shouldn't be starting. And the root cause is almost always the same: we promoted our best doer into a leadership role and never onboarded them for the new job.

I shared the story of a client who promoted his best foreman to superintendent. Six months later he wanted to fire the guy. I asked him one question: did you train him? Did you onboard him for the new role? No. So I told him to sit down with the foreman and ask how he felt he was performing. The owner was sure the foreman would never accept his old job back. The foreman was ecstatic. He knew he wasn't performing. He just didn't think asking to go back was an option. He went right back to being the best foreman on the team.

That story hits home because the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make with promotions is skipping the onboarding process. If you brought someone in from outside the company, you'd spend the time to set them up. Do the same thing with your internal people. They don't know what they don't know.

Marc asked me what the simplest thing a leader can do to improve engagement. The answer is almost embarrassingly simple. Go stand next to your employee at the coffee machine. Tell them you appreciate them. Tell them you value their contribution. Then ask one question: "What are some of your personal goals for next year?" Most people will look at you like a deer in headlights because no one has ever asked them that. That's the whole point. That five-minute conversation is one less person scrolling job boards this weekend. And right now, 51% of workers want to find a new job in the new year. Every single person on your team has the app on their phone and it's pinging them all day long.

We also dug into why values are caught, not taught. You can blow up your mission statement as big as you want and plaster it on every wall. But when your team watches leadership do the opposite of what's written on that wall, they follow the behavior, not the poster. What's written on the wall versus what walks down the hall. Every time.

I walked through all seven phases of the Core Fit Blueprint. Phase one: stop the bleeding. Think ER doc. Solve whatever is keeping you up at night and create margin so you can breathe. Phase two: become the employer of choice. Build the reputation that makes people choose you and fight to stay. Phase three: right people, right seats. Sometimes you have the right people on the bus. They're just in the wrong seats. Phase four: align people and processes through real onboarding, clear expectations, and objective measurement. Phase five: inspire a future-driven team through personal development plans and coaching. Phase six: fill your bench with passive recruiting so you're never starting from scratch. Phase seven: scale with confidence by developing future leaders and measuring the right things across the organization.

Marc raised a great cautionary point about flavor-of-the-month initiatives. I see it constantly. Leadership teams roll out a new benefit or program, check the box, and move on without promoting it or getting buy-in. That's pencil whipping. Culture change is not a six-month initiative. Your culture didn't get where it is overnight and it won't change overnight. Plant the flag and commit.

The last thing I left Marc's audience with: if you have a question you want answered, stop figuring it out on your own. Ask your people. It will take time for them to trust that honesty won't get them in trouble. But when you get into the habit of asking, validating what they say, and making visible changes based on their feedback, that is transformative. Recruiting is a marketing activity. Engagement is a leadership activity. And both are fixable.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on engagement, onboarding, and building your bench on Titans of the Trades.