Disengaged Employees Costs the Company
What Is the Difference Between Engaged and Disengaged Employees?
Everyone who has been in a typical workplace for a while is familiar with the three basic types of employees – engaged, disengaged, and actively disengaged. You’ve probably seen, worked with, and/or worked for one or all of these people. However, you may be unfamiliar with these terms and their true meaning to you and your company.
Engaged employees love their jobs and believe in their employer, the company’s goals, and the manner in which they conduct business. Often exhibiting high levels of passion and creativity, engaged employees believe they have value and management holds the same belief. They express confidence in their abilities, pride in their performance, and a connection to the company’s products and services. They typically exert a positive influence on the performance of their co-workers and subordinates.
Disengaged employees (also called “not-engaged”) look at their jobs as trading time for dollars. They show up for work at the proper time, leave the workplace at the agreed upon time, and do little in between beyond the minimum effort required to complete their job. They exhibit little passion or creativity, typically going through the motions of completing their daily duties. Most disengaged employees neither improve nor detract from staff performance, as they tend to do their jobs quietly. They do not often see their job or their employer as a long-term situation, possibly even believing they are in the wrong career or industry.
Actively disengaged employees are the true problem area of staff chemistry and company performance. Not only unhappy at work, they typically demonstrate, in word and deed, their dislike of their jobs and/or employer. They often undermine the performance of the engaged employees by voicing their displeasure and the many reasons behind it. This negative attitude can often cause operational and performance issues with the rest of their co-workers. The cliché, “one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch,” was never more true than when actively disengaged employees are allowed to voice their unhappiness to all those willing to listen.
Fortunately, actively disengaged employees typically constitute only 15% or less of total staff. Yet these workers can have a disproportionate effect on the positive contributions of the engaged employees (usually around 25% to 30% of staff). Even if a company’s engaged employees are strong-minded and committed, actively disengaged personnel can have a dangerous negative effect on the typically 55% to 60% of not-engaged staff.
How Actively Disengaged Employees Cost Money and More
Actively disengaged employees often cost employers more than team chemistry. They can cost a company thousands, if not millions of dollars. Consider but a few scenarios, some of which you may have witnessed in your workplace.
- You see a customer service representative, help desk assistant, or call center responder whose voice, words, body language, tone inflections, and brevity of answers to questions makes it clear that they are displeased with something.
- A sales team member that constantly complains about product quality, customer service, delivery times, pricing, and commission levels, annoying other team members.
- You make it a point not to contact one member of the Human Resource Department when you have a question because this employee seldom has the correct answer, spends time complaining about senior management, benefit programs, or inadequate compensation levels.
- You hesitate to call Accounting, as you’re aware of a long-term employee who was passed over for a recent promotion and has made a crusade of complaining to everyone about how unfair management has become.
Hopefully, you haven’t witnessed all of these situations, particularly at the same company. If you have had to work in an environment that contained one or more actively disengaged employees, you are aware of the potential and real damage these employees can inflict on the rest of the staff.
From a management perspective, the cost to businesses because of the actions of actively disengaged employees is potentially staggering. For example, The Gallup Organization, the famous and well-respected pollster and survey company, conducted a wide-ranging study over a five-year period regarding employee beliefs and actions. During the survey period, the cost to companies of keeping actively disengaged employees was tracked and monitored.
Unlike the often-termed “sleep walking” behavior of the not-engaged staff, actively disengaged employees act out their lack of job satisfaction, thereby generating decreased productivity in many co-workers surrounding them. Even after management learns of the existence of one or more actively disengaged employees, executives must often tread carefully with their plans to diminish or eliminate the effects of these people.
Depending on the company’s industry, size, current market position, competition, location, staff composition, or other factors, management may have a relatively easy or impossibly difficult time in fixing or eliminating the problem. Union contracts, local labor laws, diversity, and/or tenure designations can often make the elimination of actively disengaged employees a challenge.
The wide variety of reasons for one to become actively disengaged also hinders attempts at behavior modification. For example, should the causes of an employee’s negativity generate from their personal life, a company may have limited options to improve their demeanor and performance. If their attitudes are directly related to workplace issues, management may be able to address and correct the origins of staff displeasure. However, personal or family issues generating this unacceptable behavior present a different, more difficult challenge.
Ignoring actively disengaged employees is usually the wrong action plan. The cost of their lack of personal productivity and the effect they have on the performance of other staff members is too great. Management should make every attempt to identify those actively disengaged employees and take all appropriate actions to correct the problem as quickly and painlessly as possible.