$483
billion to $605 billion – that’s how colossal the damage made by
“actively disengaged” employees to the U.S. economy is, each year in
productivity losses (Gallup, 2017). To put this in context, the cost of
productivity losses from disengaged employees to the U.S economy per year, is more than 5 times the GDP of Sri Lanka
in 2017, which was $87 billion (Sri Lanka Department of Census & Statistics,
2018).
Employee engagement is
achieved when an employee’s enthusiasm for work is stimulated and directed
towards the success of the organization (Armstrong, 2009). This means that there exits a definite
correlation between employee engagement and organizational success. It can also
be inferred that the employee disengagement is a factor that can
contribute to the failure of an organization.
Its important to understand how
engaged employees can benefit an organization and its even more important to be
aware of the adverse effects actively disengaged employees can cause. Video 2
summarizes some of the key significances of employee engagement. Below are some
of the key points:
·
Engaged employees perform better than those who
are disengaged
·
Engaged employees are 87% less likely to seek
other employment opportunities
·
Engaged employees take fewer sick days off than
disengaged employees
·
Engaged employees act as ambassadors of the
organization, ensuring customer satisfaction by going above and beyond
It’s vital to look at the
flip-side of the above as well:
·
Disengaged employees perform below par,
compared to those who are engaged
·
Disengaged employees are 87% more likely to
seek other employment opportunities
·
Disengaged employees take more sick days off
than engaged employees
·
Disengaged employees do not act as ambassadors
of the organization, they will at most only do what they are “asked to do”
Video
2: Why
employee engagement matters
Source: (ENGAGE, 2016)
Though most
organizations may chose to believe that their employees are engaged (or at
least not actively disengaged), Gallup survey from 2018 summarized on Figure 07
shows a shocking 13% of the workforce in the U.S are actively disengaged while
only 34% are engaged.
Figure
07: Employee Engagement Trending in the U.S
Source:
(Harter, 2018)
At my current workplace, employee
satisfaction surveys are used to measure engagement but the data gathered is
not analyzed in ways that it can infer the percentage of engaged, disengaged
and actively disengaged employees separately. However, it was interesting to
note on the last survey, that most of the questions had about 10 to 20 responses
falling in to “completely disagree” category (negative responses). Even more
interestingly, upon closer examination it was found out that those 10 to 20
responses mostly came in from a common group of responders. This can be taken
as an indicator of the presence of actively disengaged employees, though the
number seems insignificant compared to the total employee population of 450.
Over the last three years, the
number of these “completely disagree” response has been increasing and symptoms
of disengagement such as increase in employee turnover and drop in productivity
have come to light. It would be fascinating to analyze the data further to find
correlations between the negative responders and the key performance indicators
of those teams & departments.
Having established the
significance of employee engagement, it is critical for any organization to be
aware of where it stands & what percentage of employees fall in to each of
the categories, so that the necessary remedial action plans/strategies can be implemented
before it’s too late – specially for fast growing organizations, this is a
vital aspect of ensuring sustainable growth.
References:
Armstrong, M. (2009). Armstrong's handbook of human resource management
practice. 11th ed. London: Kogan Page, pp 338-340.
Gallup (2017) State of the American Workplace. [Online]
Available at: https://news.gallup.com/file/reports/199961/SOAW_Report_GEN_1216_WEB_FINAL_rj.pdf [Accessed 23 September 2019].
Harter, J. (2018) Employee Engagement on the Rise in the
U.S. [Online] Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/241649/employee-engagement-rise.aspx [Accessed
on 23 September 2019].
Sri Lanka Department of Census & Statistics (2018).
ECONOMIC STATISTICS
OF SRI LANKA 2018 [Online] Available at: http://www.statistics.gov.lk/EconomicStat/EconomicStatistics2018.pdf
[Accessed 15 September 2019].
