The Impact Of Disengaged Employees
On average, about one out of three employees is engaged. You cannot build a high-performance organization with statistics like that. In fact, we estimate that the best and highest performing organizations have a minimum of 90% employee engagement.
As an executive or leader, you can tell when people you work with are not engaged. You feel it in the way people interact. You feel the lack of energy and excitement. You feel it in the quality of products and services you deliver. If you can feel it, you can be certain your customers do too. When your customers feel it, your bottom line feels it. To put it bluntly, disengaged employees are toxic to a companies culture and you should work to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.
Why Employees Become Disengaged
Most people start new jobs with energy and excitement. Over time, their energy diminishes and they become disillusioned with their job. In part, Some energy is lost because people get bored of doing the same thing for too long. However, in our experience, the primary cause for disengagement is an emotional response. When people do not feel valuable, they shut down. If you felt as though your actions did not make an impact, why would you try?
A few of the most significant areas that can impact a person’s feeling of contribution and value in an organization include:
1) Management – A person’s direct manager has long been quoted as the number one reason for leaving a job and people begin to disengage long before they quit. Most managers spend years becoming good at their trade but have little to no training in the art of management. The lack of management skills results in under managing some areas while overmanaging others. Poorly trained managers often unwittingly encourage bad behaviors and stifle innovation and progress. All of these factors lead to high levels of disengagement.
2) A lack of challenging goals – People feel valued when they are actually creating value. The less challenging the goals, the less value people will create, and the more they will disengage.
3) Bureaucracy and ineffective processes – The average organization is running at about one third or less of its potential from a process standpoint alone. People feel the inefficiency. When a process becomes an impediment, it sends the message that a person and their time are not valued even if it is not true. The more times people are blocked by a process, the more they will feel frustrated. The more frustrated people feel, the less they will try.
4) Disengagement is contagious – People share their opinions with their coworkers. Stronger feelings get shared more and faster. We are also more suggestible than most of us realize. So, the more people feel undervalued, the more they will share and the faster those opinions will spread to others.
There are also a handful of people out there that are not engaged from the start. This typically occurs when they are just coming to work for a paycheck or when they are doing something that is outside of their area of interest. These people are the exception, not the rule but they can be highly toxic to an organization for the reasons mentioned above.
How to Increase Employee Engagement
Increasing employee engagement is simple in theory. If you have the right people on the team and the right processes, your people will feel valued and they will be engaged.
Building the right processes for engagement means making people feel valued and important. Key factors for building these systems include
1) A vision and mission that tap into people’s natural motivations
2) A clear method for people to bring in new ideas
3) An effective and efficient prioritization or project management process
4) Good hiring practices
If your organization and system needs a significant amount of work, it is often more effective to adopt a framework like Scrum, Kanban or LeSS as a starting point. These frameworks were created for the manufacturing and software industries but they are rapidly being adopted in other areas because of their effectiveness when implemented well. They provide almost everything you need for team-level processes and an experienced coach can help you fill the voids with ease.
The video below dives a bit deeper into some management techniques for increasing motivation and engagement. Use the contact form below, send us a text or give us a call if you would like to speak with one of our Organizational Engineers about increasing engagement at your organization.
Video: How to Motivate Staff and Engage Employees
Video: Employee Engagement Programs: Are They Worth It?