Want to target an annual saving of $6 million per 500 employees? Prioritize inclusive leadership through neuro-inclusion
Published on 18 April 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
A company with 500 employees which does not have employee engagement as one of its strategic priorities is throwing away almost $6 million a year due to lost productivity caused by disengagement and attrition. The research also suggests that what employees value extends well beyond compensation: feeling valued, having opportunities to grow, and experiencing a sense of belonging and connection to the organization all matter.
Wells Fargo offers an interesting example of what can happen when an organization deliberately redesigns some of the conditions through which talent is identified and enabled. Its neurodiversity program was established to access a highly skilled and often overlooked talent pool, but reported benefits have extended beyond the neurodivergent employees it was designed to support.
Key takeaways
If you have 500 employees, chances are that you are losing almost $6 million every year in lost productivity due to disengagement and attrition. Of course, a few of your employees are thriving stars who not only individually contribute incredible value to your mission but also enhance the performance of those around them; unfortunately, this performance bonus is outweighed almost three-fold by ‘productivity and energy vampires’ whose toxic behavior drags other team members’ performance down.
Engagement is influenced by the conditions in which people work. Research suggests that feeling valued, involved, able to grow, and connected to organizational purpose matters substantially to employees. Rather than treating engagement as something to stimulate directly, organizations can examine how their leadership, culture, and ways of working create – or constrain – those conditions.
Neuro-inclusion offers useful design principles for creating those conditions. Wells Fargo’s enterprise neurodiversity program illustrates how changing recruitment, onboarding, development, and working practices to enable neurodivergent talent can produce benefits that extend more widely – including reported improvements in innovation, skills availability, and employee satisfaction.
Employee disengagement and attrition come at a high cost
The costs of disengagement and attrition are $5.7 million a year in lost productivity for a company with 500 employees, and may even be as high as $8.9 million a year.
These figures are based on research conducted amongst the 500 large companies that trade on the American stock exchanges, and are listed in the Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P) index (references are given at the end). They are perhaps not surprising, given that new data show that only 2 out of every 10 US employees say that they feel connected to their organization’s mission.
Surveys have revealed a significant mismatch between what managers assume their employees want, and what employees actually value. Managers assume that their team members yearn for higher compensation, whether from their current employer or another, and that poor health can explain disengagement. Employees, however, want different things: they want to feel a sense of belonging within their organization and team, to have the opportunity to grow, and to be valued. It is somewhat more important to employees to feel valued by their organization than by their manager, but both rate amongst the most important factors that employees consider. Luckily, there is some agreement, with both managers and employees rating work-life balance and interest in work equally.
Engagement grows when people can see how their contribution matters
Employees want to feel valued, involved, and connected to your mission. They want to be engaged in delivering your mission.
The same piece of research that shared the shocking cost of disengagement and attrition defines six different categories of employee engagement, ranging from the 4% ‘thriving stars’ who exemplify strong alignment with your mission and also have a positive impact on the performance of their people around them, to the 11% actively disengaged ‘productivity and energy vampires’ whose toxic behavior is contagious to team members. Between these engagement extremes, most people are getting on with their job either reliably and with a sense of commitment, or having quietly checked out; some, including your strongest performers who no longer feel valued and have been poached by your competitors, are on their way to another organization, and some are working at least one additional full-time role either to earn more money or to provide development opportunities for themselves that they lack in their role at your organization.
An effective strategy to increase engagement and productivity, and reduce the millions you’re throwing away each year on disengagement and attrition, is to move as many employees as possible further away from the ‘productivity and energy vampire’ end of the scale and towards the opposite ‘thriving star’ end. Simply migrating some of the vampires to become quietly disengaged, without even thinking about increasing the proportion of thriving stars, will increase productivity by reducing the negative spiral of a toxic team atmosphere.
One important lever is to strengthen the connection between people's contribution and the organization's purpose. You can recreate the conditions experienced by your thriving stars and reliably committed employees for everyone by designing and implementing a skills- and outcome-focused culture. The opportunity is to become clearer about the outcomes and contributions that matter, while allowing greater flexibility in how different people achieve them.
Wells Fargo’s neurodiversity inclusion program illustrates that designing for neurodivergent talent creates wider benefits
This kind of organizational culture is inspired by being inclusive of the needs of neurodivergent employees, such as autistics, dyslexics, and those with ADHD. This is where neuro-inclusion becomes interesting beyond inclusion itself. Practices designed around people whose needs are poorly served by conventional systems can reveal assumptions in those systems – and create better ways of working that benefit a much wider group. I have written previously about business benefits enjoyed by neuro-inclusive cultures, and now want to share the experiences of a program designed and executed by Wells Fargo.
Wells Fargo launched its enterprise neurodiversity program in 2020. It is led by Stephen DeStefani and while talking at the Neurodiversity in Business 2024 conference he told me that it was seen as “business imperative” to establish this program. Indeed, one of its stated goals is to “establish a strategic advantage for Wells Fargo through access to highly skilled and largely untapped talent pools”.
Neurodivergent individuals find the program personally transformative, and Stephen has shared that some learnt new coding languages in as little as one week, compared to the industry standard of six months. The program is also bringing significant benefit across the whole organization in stimulating ideas for new programs, and novel solutions to both customer-facing and internal business challenges. Skills gaps have closed, and employee satisfaction has increased overall.
The hiring approach that has been implemented is designed to provide the conditions under which neurodivergent candidates can demonstrate the skills that they would bring to a role. Candidates are assessed through interactive workshops and team-based problem-solving, instead of having to try to fit into a traditional, socially-oriented, high pressure interview. Successful candidates receive ongoing training, mentoring, and accommodations to help them to thrive in their roles.
Importantly, this program has been scaled step-wise, and implemented in a sustainable way. The program initially focused on hiring and enabling neurodivergent candidates to the technology division, and the success experienced has attracted an additional six divisions to roll in to the program. Hiring managers in participating divisions have been upskilled, and all employees in the organization now have access to education and training to build their knowledge and comfort of working with neurodivergent team members. 97% of the almost 300 neurodivergent hires made to Q1 2024 are still working at Wells Fargo, a situation which is ideal to continually spread knowledge and inclusive behavior from within so that it becomes firmly embedded in the organizational culture and is sustainable in the long-term.
The bigger opportunity is to design the conditions for engagement
Engagement matters, but treating engagement itself as the intervention can send organizations in the wrong direction. The more useful question is what people are experiencing in the system around them: how contribution is recognized, how decisions are made, how much freedom people have in how they work, and whether different strengths can genuinely influence outcomes.
The Wells Fargo example illustrates a principle that now sits at the heart of my work: designing around people at the edges can reveal how to build better systems for everyone. Neuro-inclusion therefore offers more than a way to support neurodivergent employees. It can provide a source of insight for designing the leadership and coordination systems through which diverse talent becomes collective performance.
➡️ If these ideas resonate, you can explore how I design leadership and coordination for complex, high-pressure environments on the Services page.
References
Cost of disengagement and attrition: ‘Some employees are destroying value. Others are building it. Do you know the difference?’ Research from McKinsey, 2023, available here.
Only 2 in every 10 US employees feel connected to their organization’s mission: research from Gallup, 2024, available here.
What managers think employees want, and what employees really want, from their workplace: ‘‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours.’ Research from McKinsey, 2021, available here.
Wells Fargo neurodiversity program and goals: information is available here.
Wells Fargo benefits and description of the hiring program: ‘Disability Inclusion In The Workplace: Wells Fargo’s Stephen DeStefani On How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Have a Disability’, 2022, available here.¨
