By the Numbers: Disengaged and Actively Disengaged Employees

After taking last Monday off for Labor Day here in the United States, we resume our new feature on data, By the Numbers. We start off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

In our last installment of By the Numbers (scroll down to August 31), we explored the prevalence of projects that fail. The prior week (on August 24), we presented data linking employee disengagement to absenteeism. Previous posts on data have shattered the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication (August 17) and looked at fear of recrimination in the workplace (August 10).

Today we explore the extent of disengagement in the typical workplace. (Check back next week, when we will report on the economic impact of disengagement in U.S.-based companies.)

According to research by Gallup, the ratio of engaged employees to disengaged employees in high-performing organizations is approximately 8 to 1. However, that is the exception. In typical organizations, according to Gallup, the ratio is 1.5 to 1. Thus, on average, for every three employees who are engaged, two are not just disengaged but actively disengaged.

Gallup sorts employees into three broad categories: engaged, disengaged, and actively disengaged. It describes engaged employees as those who “work with passion and feel a profound connection to the company” and who “drive innovation and move the organization forward.”

Gallup describes disengaged employees as “checked out . . . sleepwalking through their workday, putting time but not energy or passion into their work.” It describes actively disengaged employees as “acting out their unhappiness” and actually undermining “what their engaged coworkers accomplish."

Reflecting on this data, ask yourself these questions:

• What ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is true of the enterprise, division, site, or team that you most identify with?

• What visible, day-to-day behaviors do you believe characterize engaged employees? Disengaged employees? Actively disengaged employees?

• Which managers or supervisors in your organization veer toward disengagement or even active disengagement? What, if anything, are you doing about it?

• Can you think of incidents in which a disengaged employee has adversely affected a customer’s loyalty to your product or service? If so, how easy did you find it to think of such an incident?

• Has the customer or customers in question remained with your company, or have they defected to a competitor? Can you get them back? How much revenue have you lost? What is the secondary cost of bad “buzz” about your company in the marketplace?

• Looking back to the August 24 post of this blog, in which we discussed absenteeism as a consequence of disengagement, what would calculate as the financial cost of physical absenteeism of disengaged and actively disengaged employees in your organization?

• What are you doing to shore up engagement?

• In particular, what are you doing to make sure your managers and supervisors are fully engaged?