Employees that enjoy their work are usually the most invested and the most valuable. But are all of your employees as engaged as you’d like? The 2013 State of the American Workplace Report says no. Gallup categorized workers into three specific groups: engaged, disengaged, and actively disengaged. Engaged employees are actively contributing to the good of your business. Disengaged employees are simply present in body but not in spirit, essentially passionless. Actively disengaged employees look for ways to turn their dissatisfaction outward in the workplace.
So where do you think most employees fall? That above-mentioned report states that 50 percent of U.S. workers are disengaged, whereas the engaged and actively disengaged categories are comprised of 30 percent and 20 percent of employees respectively.
The actively disengaged employee sounds like the worst of the lot. These are the workers who go out of their way to disrupt the workplace. They may arrive late or leave early often. They may take more sick days than necessary. They may use up office materials and time. It’s a decidedly offensive position. By contrast, the disengaged worker holds a more neutral position.
Yet the fact that disengaged employees make up half of the U.S. workforce is more alarming than a percentage of openly harmful workers. That’s a huge foundation of talent that simply has no drive to improve, create or contribute. They’re skating through the workday, coasting from break to break and watching the clock for quitting time.
How do you find these specific offenders? Since they don’t fall into the “active” category, they take a little work to find. If they aren’t big on your radar, they may just be what you’re looking for. Those that only do the bare minimum but aren’t really contributing are the employees that need attention. Since they may be hard to pinpoint, an effective way of re-engaging these lost sheep may be looking for ways to improve the overall aura of your business to get them back on track. If that doesn’t work, more dire and specific tactics may be called for.
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Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
