Why Employees are Not Engaged at Work

During my talk on employee engagement with Calodagh McCumiskey last week we explored the statistics around the fact that 85% of employees are not actively engaged at work.?

I asked Calodagh to give her opinion about why people are not actively engaged.?

Firstly Calodagh defined employee engagement as "when employees are enthusiastic about work and committed to the success of the business then they act accordingly. At a very human level it means that their mind and their heart is in the job and they're mentally and emotionally showing up".

She went on to say that “people don't start jobs with the idea that they're going to be checked out, people start jobs with enthusiasm and by and large they're interested in getting involved and doing something useful and meaningful but people disconnect for different reasons; sometimes they might feel disconnected at a higher level or it can be at a very practical level.

Speaking firstly about disconnection from the viewpoint of the higher level, she added that people can feel disconnected mentally and emotionally from the organisation if they're not fully brought into the values or they might feel disconnected from their boss as they didn't feel supported by them or they might feel disconnected from colleagues, or they might be frustrated at not having the resources that are needed to do a good job. It could be that a company had a plan to invest in something and told the employee this, but then the budget doesn't allow it and frustration levels can rise.?

Then there is the psychological safety piece where they just do not feel respected, or appreciated in general, and within the context of the business, they don't feel safe to contribute, they don't feel safe to participate engage, or to challenge something.? As a result, they're not mentally and emotionally all in, so those would be the top level reasons.

Then at a practical level they don't feel that they're paid properly, they don't feel that they're growing, they're stagnating, they're not being recognised, perhaps they put in a lot of effort before and that wasn’t appreciated.? Or they're flooded with work and feeling overwhelmed.??

We're living in a sea of stress outside of work, particularly since COVID.? ?

You can see the positive side in that people are talking about things more, but there is a very clear rise in stress with more people stressed more of the time and that's showing up in so many different ways like anxiety and depression.

I then went on to talk about “perception” and the fact that it's how we perceive the environment around us and that sometimes we perceive something that's not actually the truth of a situation but it's our perception. ?We could go into work and we can have our own stressful situations at home whether it be financial, whether it be an illness with a family member, whether we've a child struggling at school, whether we don't have child and we'd love to have a child, all of these different things going on in the background.? And we could be on a team with everyone else who have their back stories, they're sitting around the table (and no we're not supposed to know what everybody's back story is) and we perceive that people should be doing something and we perceive it's their fault why we are feeling stressful because they're not doing that thing you think they should be doing. IT'S PERCEPTION!!!

When we come back and reflect on what the situation really is we might find our perceptions are out of alignment.? For example using the psychological safety piece we can ask ourselves

“Why is it I'm not feeling safe here, why is my voice not being heard, is it that I feel I don’t have the right to speak up in this organisation?”

That could be the disconnect between what's being perceived and what's actually the truth.

We're all bringing in our own stresses with us into the workplace and we're acting from what's inside of us and our perception of what someone else should or should not have done.

Calodagh then added that it can appear that another person appears apathetic or checked out, but it's just that they're flooded with their own stuff.?

She added a bit of emotional intelligence is really important and communication and to notice what are people's normal behaviors and if they're acting differently you can drill down into that and ask something like “How's everything?” ? People can go from managing to struggling with a diagnosis of a family member or anything can be happening in their lives. The number one factor in our well-being is the quality of relationships that we have in our lives. When we notice when somebody is behaving differently, and we should never judge and we should never assume, we have to take account for our own perceptions and be aware that we mightn't know what’s going on for other people

Stress is contagious and it's been shown that we have to be really present to what's actually going on in the environment with the people in our teams and sit down and listen so that we can fully understand people.?

The whole communication piece is so important, Dolores added, we're fueled by whatever we have inside of us, if we are very stressed out, our actions and our communications will come from this place, unless we consciously correct that.? How we communicate is having an effect on everybody around us, there's absolutely no doubt about the power of words so we can look at the whole communication piece if we see we have disengaged employees.? ?

Calodagh went on to talk about four of the basic psychological needs we all have; certainty uncertainty love and connection and the fact that those needs need to be met for all of us. If somebody has a high psychological need for certainty and they're already stressed in their own life, they're gonna want to have regular updates in any type of a change process.? So it's really important to be mindful of this, she added, if there are to be changes to a strategy. It's also important to update people at critical points in any process, it builds trust and goodwill. It's also important to be respectful of communications outside of business hours so that employees know they have the right to disconnect, this will be different in different businesses depending on people's job responsibilities of course, but having respect is important.?

Sometimes in businesses, you'd hear people saying that they have meetings but nobody talks, that's a communication problem as well, so you want to have a two way flow in communication and you want to have clarity coming from the leadership and if all of the leadership team aren't brought into stuff and given the same message that can cause a lot of problems as well.? So clarity of communication is essential for sure.?

Where companies have a mission statement and value statement, Dolores added, and the employees know that the company doesn't live by them, that creates distrust and creates the culture, that invisible atmosphere that's in the company.? If you don't feel that you're allowed to be seen and to be heard, which again are basic fundamental needs that we all have, then you won't really have trust in the organisation if the actions of management aren't in alignment with the values they say they have.?

I think trust is huge as employees would be much more motivated if they trust what the company says it's going to do.

That brings me on to something else that I was going to discuss about the whole employee engagement piece starting from onboarding, and although not every small company would have an onboarding policy, there is an onus on employers or whoever is doing the recruitment process to be very clear with their communication from the get-go.?

What is the job they are hiring for and, ensuring they are hiring a person that's in alignment with their values and in alignment with the culture?? In this way they're more likely to be more satisfied.

You can get the full conversation on You Tube here.

And you can connect with Calodagh on Linked in at this link.

Until next time!

Dolores Andrew,

Wellness Trainer and Holistic Life Coach ?