Overcoming employee disengagement -the surest way of increasing productivity
Employee engagement has become one of the challenging issues on the minds of many leaders either in the profit or non-profit, small, medium, or large companies. Leadership in many companies are grappling with employees who show up to work but are most of the working periods indifferent about their work output.
Advertisement
Many employees are less concerned about their performance and how it spills over on the organisation's performance. Disengaged able men and women are always looking out on the wall clock for the closing time to rush out from the work place. Some even look for excuses to close early or skip work.
In fact some disengaged employees are satisfied with the situation, so an employee satisfaction survey will show that the employee is happy with the job because he or she is paid for no work done.
Generally, a highly engaged workforce is synonymous with a company that outperforms their competitor, which is why industry captains must focus on the issue and deal squarely with it. Gallup Incorporated an American global performance management consulting company revealed years ago that 54 per cent of employees are disengaged, with only 29 per cent engaged, whiles 17 per cent are actively disengaged.
Though there are no available employee engagement statistics in Ghana, one study has commented on engagement patterns and their ripple effect on employee outputs. Agyemang and Ofei in their 2013 study opined that engaged employees were highly committed to their work role compared to their disengaged counterparts; and that the private sector organisations had high appetite for engaging their employees than public sector organisations. Deductively, one can infer that the low levels of productivity experienced in Ghanaian industry may also be due to employee disengagement at our workplaces.
So what is employee engagement and how can industry captains in both public and private, profit and non-profit organisations address the challenge where majority of the work-force are disengaged or actively disengaged?
Employee engagement - This is a workplace condition resulting in the right state for all employees to give up their best at all times, steadfast to the company goals and values, inspired to contribute to organisational success with a greater sense of their own well-being. David Macleod is of the view that employee engagement is how companies create the conditions in which employees offer more of their capacity and potential. Employee engagement has been explained in three dimensions.
Engaged employees are innovation drivers who work with passion and drive the company forward. They are enthusiastic about their work and workplace, and their values are in sync with the values and visions of the organisation. Engaged workers have an entrepreneurial mindset of ownership and they are stunning colleagues who become ambassadors of the company and propagate the values, mission, and visions of the organisation to various key stakeholders. Engaged employees are of the belief that their active participation towards the success of the company is tied in with their personal growth. The support of any plan needs this group who intrinsically are motivated and they champion an organisation’s ideas and plans.
Disengaged employees - These are the silent majority who blend well with the rest of the herds and are the nonconformist, counter-culture guys who have a bad attitude, low energy, sleepwalking throughout the work period. Sometimes a few disengaged employees would like to stage a company coup from their units or sections. They are very transactional in their attitude, viewing their jobs as an exchange of their time for pay. Such ones are usually extrinsically motivated. The consequence of employee disengagement is poor workout, unhealthy activities at work like going for long breaks, chatting with workmates and not concentrating on the work, surfing on the internet for personal satisfaction, closing early from work most of the time and so on (counter-work productive behaviours). Also, they are the workers when the entire company or a section is experiencing success are silent and do not celebrate or identify with the achievements. There are, however, some few introverts who are naturally quiet and are satisfied working in their own corner and this category of workers cannot be described as disengaged workers. Additionally, some employees may be disengaged but will behave as engaged workers because of their personal work ethics. These class of workers, work to rule and are not enthusiastic about the work, however, because the job pays their bills they work to meet the minimum standards by their employer.
Actively Disengaged - Clint Swindall said that actively disengaged employees are people who exist on this earth for the sole purpose of blocking visions. They are not just happy with their work but are actively venting their frustration and kicking against any idea, proposal, and or plans that the organisation put forward. They undermine the efforts of their colleagues and express their negative emotions openly by criticising almost all organisational policies and sabotage projects.
Why do employees become disengaged?
Many disengaged employees are in such unproductive state because they feel disrespected by their leaders. A survey conducted around the world among nearly 20,000 employees by the Harvard Business Review and Tony Schwartz discovered that employees value being treated with respect than being recognised and appreciated, or the leader communicating the vision or providing feedback. Similarly, Agyemang Badu and Asumeng (2013) confirm that Ghanaian workers value interactional fairness than just wantonly distributing resources or following through strict laid down procedures. It is arguably conclusive that other push factors of employee disengagement are organisational injustices in the form of distributive, procedural, interactional, informational, and promotional injustice. For example an aspect of distributive injustice is a situation where procedures, rules and regulations are unfairly applied either as a result of favouritism or nepotism. Also informational injustice takes the form of the degree to which authorities provide adequate explanations for decisions.
Can employee engagement be improved?
Jim Harder, one of the researchers of Gallup Incorporated is of the view that employee engagement can be enriched if managerial leaders work on their interpersonal skills, centred on social graces, communication, personal habits, and friendliness. In a sense managers must connect to the hearts of their employees and promote interactional fairness at the workplace. Managerial leaders must augment the above cluster of skills with the hard management rudiments of proper job design, performance metrics, provide the needed resources, and be generous with praise and recognition.
Many business practitioners are of the view that to solve employee disengagement, leaders must ensure that there is constant information flow and feedback between workers and leaders, leaders themselves must be deeply engaged and so on. However, the prescriptions solely focus on the managerial leader. What practitioners forget is that engaged employees are themselves an influence on their counterparts. Swindall suggests that in most instances the 54 per cent disengaged employee who happen to be in the majority are sometimes looking for direction. The 54 per cent disengaged workers can get directions from either the 29 per cent who are actively engaged and have profound connection to the company or they get it from 17 per cent actively disengaged miserable vision blockers. He argued that the same way leaders have tremendous influence on employees so do employees too on their peers. Instead of always focusing on the manager to solve employee disengagement issues, managerial leaders must identify and implore the support of the engaged employees for direction and not always adopt the manager-centred solution.
The writer is the Head of Business Administration Dept. of University of Professional Studies