Change Your Space, Change Your Culture: How Engaging Workspaces Lead to Transformation and Growth

Chapter 2The $1 Trillion Black Hole

Culture is hard to measure and it can't fit in a spreadsheet. For that reason investors, particularly those with a value bent, often totally ignore it. That's a mistake …

—Warren Buffett

The number one resource of any company is engagement. Businesses must have people who volunteer, speak up, collaborate, go the extra mile, work late as needed, and challenge everyone around them to be better. We know from the Case4Space research that engaged employees take 10 times fewer sick days, make 37 percent more sales, and stay in their jobs five times longer than disengaged employees.¹

Yet disengagement is baked into the traditional workplace. And we all know it. We joke about it and it resonates for us as a basis for humor on TV and in movies. The popular television series The Office ran for nine seasons on the premise that work is a soul-killing enterprise and that it requires daily insanity to survive.

Why are we so disengaged?

The people who work for or around you live in centrifuges. Their lives spin so fast—working two jobs to make ends meet, driving kids to sporting and school activities, caring for aging parents, and the like—that they are pinned to the outside wall of their existence. Because of the centrifugal force, they have no freedom, and cannot rise to creativity or initiative. Many have given up; they are zombies. And many of them really need the workplace. We all know those who see their job as a respite, an oasis. Think of the recent ...