Senior Leaders & Managers: What is Staff Disengagement Costing You?

Why does engagement matter?

According to a Gallup study across 190 diverse industries, on average in Australia, only 24% of employees are engaged in their work, with 60% not engaged and 16% actively disengaged. Roughly 1 in 4 workers are psychologically committed to their job and likely making a significant contribution to their organisation. 

These statistics are frightening when one understands the bottom-line impact to organisations through low productivity, hindering genuine customer service and organisational profitability. We also know that low employee engagement negatively impacts morale, retention rates and workplace culture. 

The Gallup organisation also found that 70% of the variance in an employee’s engagement was a result of how their direct supervisor interacted with the employee. Furthermore, Managers who are supervised by highly engaged senior leaders are 39% more likely to be engaged themselves. Senior leaders need to be involved in solving their low engagement problems.  

Most misunderstood element!

One of the biggest keys to understanding employee engagement, and therefore how to improve it, is to recognise that it is essentially an individual psychological phenomenon. Organisations who want a quick fix, tend to take a blanket approach to engage - “them.” However, it is not a group problem, so a group solution will not significantly solve the problem. A group solution tends to be like a broken clock, which is right at least twice every 24 hours.   

Therefore, to address a cultural problem contributing to some broad employee engagement issues will help, but only to some employees and will only create a short-term win. It will not create a robust long-term strategic solution to employee engagement.

Big mistake!

Another common mistake made with employee engagement is that engagement levels are seen as the sole responsibility of the direct supervisor. Since engagement is essentially a psychological phenomenon coming from within an individual, a manager cannot be solely responsible to improve it.  

They do have significant influence, as the Gallup studies show, however ultimately it is to be solved through a mutual exchange in relationship between the direct supervisor and the employee. Too often engagement assessments can produce numerical scores that create fear in the manager to get their numbers up, implying that low scores are entirely the fault of the direct supervisor.  

A strategy that will work!

As a senior leader or a manager it is difficult enough to take care of strategic performance or regular business activities, now the expectation is to add further responsibility and somehow individually manage the nuances of all employees’ engagement levels. Although research has now clarified for leaders what the key engagement areas are, for a supervisor to add to their list the need to be across all areas in a customised fashion for all employees is a big ask.

Hence, for an effective engagement strategy to work, there needs to be an easy way for a supervisor to have, at their fingertips, accurate individual employee data on workplace expectations across all key engagement areas. Below is a screenshot of a section of an effective report showing some of the critical engagement areas to assess.  

Three key aspects to customising your approach to engagement

Not only is it important to assess all key areas for each employee, but there needs to be a way to quickly know what specific workplace expectation area/s the employee deems most important for them (dark blue bars above indicate level of importance to employee).  

The supervisor also needs to know the satisfaction level the employee is experiencing in each area (percentage score above indicates this), in order to know which area/s need to be explored. Finally, if the supervisor also knows the natural tendencies of the employee (light blue bars above) they can ascertain how likely the employee is to naturally receive the workplace expectation they desire, and how much the employee needs to contribute in order to see change in their current satisfaction levels.  

The supervisor simply has a constructive conversation

Pardon the pun, but this allows the right amount of employee engagement to contribute in the engagement process. With these three sets of data on all the key areas of workplace engagement, there is no place for mere finger pointing at the supervisor to fix it. Instead the data creates a genuine opportunity for a professional exchange of value between the supervisor and the employee. 

The employee has certain expectations they would like to experience from their workplace, and the supervisor wants certain things from the employee for the workplace. With the right data in hand, together they make a deal with the supervisor being guided in a constructive conversation toward a genuine solution to improved engagement, and the organisation gets the results it wants.  

Book a Free Strategy Session with me to see how I can assist you in implementing an Employee Engagement Strategy that really works! 

David Allan MBus.

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