The cost of employee disengagement

Consider your top employee, that person you’d hate to see leave. What would the impact of losing that person have on productivity, customers, and revenue? While some people quit and leave a company, others quit and stay.

In other words, they disengage. Today's workplaces are experiencing changes at unprecedented rates. The rise of digitisation, increased access to information, and the globalisation of markets are among the trends challenging traditional approaches to work, company cultures, management and jobs. Organisations everywhere are looking for strategies and tactics to stay competitive and grow and simply doing what they've done in the past will likely prove unsuccessful. In Australia and New Zealand alone, the cost of disengaged employees is estimated at approximately AU$70 billion dollars annually.

Within an organisation you will more often than not find all three types of employees. These types consist of engaged employees, not engaged employees and the most damaging for a business; the actively disengaged employee. Hejjas, Miller and Scarles (2018) reflects that there is a cost of disengagement for the workplace that is derived from these three types of staff members and decoding this could exponentially change your business. Organisations need to ensure that they are creating a culture of well-being within the workplace and should adjust and highlight what they offer to help employees maintain high levels of well-being due to reasons beyond receiving a regular pay check. Usman Aslam, Farwa Muqadas, Muhammad Kashif Imran, Ubaid Ur Rahman, (2018)

According to Gallup (2017), 85% of employees worldwide are not engaged or are actively disengaged in their jobs. Low engagement is a concern, Gallup says, because businesses with the highest employee engagement are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than those with the lowest engagement among employees.

Gallup also relays that only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. This represents a major barrier to productivity for organisations everywhere – and suggests a staggering waste of human potential. Why is this engagement number so low? There are many reasons — but resistance to rapid change is a big one, Gallup’s research and experience have discovered. In particular, organisations have been slow to adapt to breakneck changes produced by information technology, globalisation of markets for products and labour, the rise of the gig economy, and younger workers’ unique demands. Leaders improve productivity by becoming far more employee-centred; build strengths-based organisations to unleash workers’ potential; and hire great managers to implement the positive change their organisations need not only to survive, but to thrive.

This kind of scenario plays out in companies every day. And the cost in enormous in terms of both time and money. But if you were to stay and disengage, the cost may be even worse. According to Gallup, a lack of employee engagement implies a stunning amount of wasted potential, given that business units in the top quartile of Gallup’s global employee engagement database are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable that those in the bottom quartile.

When we aren’t allowed to grow within our role and organisation, we feel as if we don’t matter. We lose our status as a resource to that company and instead simply become a cog in the wheel, easily swapped out. Johnson (2018) states, that if you aren’t being invested in, you won’t in return, invest in your employer. Even if you don’t physically walk out the door, you will mentally check out.

How do you overcome this conundrum? It starts with recognising that every person in every company, including you, is on a learning curve. That learning curve means that every role has a shelf life. You start a new position at the low end of the learning curve, with challenges to overcome in the early days. Moving up the steep slope of growth, you acquire competence and confidence, continuing into a place of high contribution and eventually mastery at the top of the curve.

Every organisation is a collection of people on different learning cuvres. As you manage employees all along the learning curve, requiring them to jump to a new curve when they reach the top, you will have a company of people who are fully engaged. You and every person on your team is a learning machine. You want the challenge of not knowing how to do something, learning how to do it, mastering it, and then learning something new. Instead of letting the engines of your employees sit idle, crank them: learn, leap and repeat.

References:

Gallup. (2017). State of the Global Workplace. New York, NY: Gallup Press. Accessed; https://news.gallup.com/reports/220313/state-global-workplace-2017.aspx#aspnetForm

Hejjas, K., Miller, G., & Scarles, C. (2018). “It’s Like Hating Puppies!” Employee Disengagement and Corporate Social Responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3791-8

Johnson, W. (2018, April 20). How to Lose Your Best Employees. Retrieved May 4, 2018, from https://hbr.org/2018/04/how-to-lose-your-best-employees

Usman Aslam, Farwa Muqadas, Muhammad Kashif Imran, Ubaid Ur Rahman, (2018) Investigating the antecedents of work disengagement in the workplace, Journal of Management Development, Vol. 37 Issue: 2, pp.149-164, https://doi-org.ipacez.nd.edu.au/10.1108/JMD-06-2017-0210