The greatest single threat to the future of organizations as we know them today is the inability of leadership to energize its workforce for sustainable satisfaction and engagement. According to The Conference Board of Canada employee engagement scores have remained stagnant since 2010 and in many cases are declining. A new study reports that only 27 percent of Canadian employees are highly engaged, and according to The Management Journal’s semi-annual Employee Engagement Index 60% of employees report themselves as not engaged with the remainder reporting to be actively disengaged at work. The financial cost of this is staggering.

Interestingly, studies are revealing two key points. First, that engagement, as traditionally defined, is not sufficient in today’s pressured and fast-paced work environment to keep employees working effectively. And second, there are gaps in two critical areas that are essential to sustainable engagement.

The first gap is in effectively enabling workers with support, resources and tools. Although we have come a long way in recognizing the need and providing the necessary resources, tools and support for our employees, clearly we’re not there yet.

The second gap is in creating an environment that is energizing to work in – one that promotes physical, emotional and social well-being. Closing this gap is not only critical for the future, it poses a formidable challenge because it means a shift must take place in our organizational social mindset – a completely new mindset – unlike anything we’ve had in the past.

The ground-breaking revelations coming from brain science and neuroscience is pointing to the need for a deliberate way of thinking. Scientific evidence indicates that as humans we are in a constant state of energy flow, positive and negative. Studies show when we experience positive thoughts and feelings that is when we are experiencing a positive energy flow. Positive human energy has the ability to attract, mesh and combine with other positive human energy, creating an energized state that promotes a greater capacity for achieving peak performance, for building and maintaining good relationships, and for experiencing good health.

What’s interesting too is the evidence suggesting that negative human energy (negative thoughts and feelings) tends to be more ‘human’ than the positive. In other words, we must consciously work at being positive. Dr. Rick Hanson explains our tendency to the negative in his book “Hardwiring Happiness”. He explains that to ensure survival, our brain evolved a negativity bias, “making it like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.”

In today’s work environment, where we spend the major part of our life, there is ample opportunity for the emergence of negative thoughts and feelings. Over the last decade workforces have felt the effects of being connected 24/7 worsened by the need to do more for (and with) less, particularly in public service industries. We are living in a time ripe for negativity to take hold and grow within even the most engaged workforce. It is the role of leadership to successfully navigate these times and develop a workforce that is agile and resilient, and a work environment that is energizing to work in.

The good news is that the field of neuroscience is providing us with some ground breaking insights – and the key lies within the mind of our workforce. The short of the story is that from the time we are born until the day we die, each and every one of us has the potential to learn and practice the skills necessary to develop a positive and energized mind. At the ground level of the workplace, we need an understanding of the connection between human energy and human behaviour and how to enhance existing technical and professional expertise. Leadership’s role therefore will be to ensure every employee has the opportunity and the desire to develop these skills.

Those organizations that put a planned systematic approach in place to train and develop mid-level and front line managers and leaders in the skill set of what can be referred to as “Positive Presence™” will be the organizations that are on their way to creating sustainable engagement and ultimately reap the performance results that are indicated to be as much as three times higher than those organizations with high traditional engagement. At the organizational level, the coming change is cultural in nature and must be supported and influenced by upper management. But the change itself begins in the hearts and minds of our workers – one person at a time – one department at a time – until it diffuses and flows throughout an entire organization.