Why Are Your Employees Disengaged and What Can You Do About It?
Summary:
The speaker discusses the common occurrence of employees leaving small to midsize organizations due to a lack of engagement. They emphasize the importance of tailoring leadership and management styles to individual employees, as well as the need for clear communication and goal alignment. Limited career growth opportunities and a lack of recognition are also identified as factors contributing to disengagement. The speaker highlights the significance of work-life balance and setting boundaries to prevent burnout. By addressing these issues, organizations can avoid the costly cycle of constantly recruiting and losing talent.
Key Takeaways:
Lack of clarity in communication leads to disengagement and wasted effort.
Providing career growth opportunities within and outside of silos is crucial for employee engagement.
Recognizing and celebrating small wins on a weekly basis keeps employees engaged.
Establishing work-life balance and setting boundaries is essential to prevent burnout.
Timestamp
[0:00:00] Introduction to the issue of employee turnover in organizations
[0:01:05] Lack of clarity and communication as a cause of disengagement
[0:02:47] Limited career growth opportunities leading to disengagement
[0:04:27] Lack of recognition and work-life balance as disengagement factors
[0:05:43] Importance of addressing these issues to avoid talent attrition
Transcript
Common Reasons Why Employees Become Disengaged
Dr. Jim: [:done and because you're not focused on tailoring your leadership and your management style to the individual needs of each employee, you're probably creating a revolving door within your organization and that's costing you big time. One of the big reasons why that revolving door might exist is because your employees.
productivity killer. They're [:They're keeping their head down and doing what's necessary to not create any attention, but they're not inspired, and that's a problem. If you as a leader want to be building an elite, team. You need to be laser focused on keeping your employees engaged.
When you think about why employees get disengaged, a lot of these reasons are rooted in the overall communication skill that exists within the organization. So one of the. Big disengagement factors is a lack of clarity. So when you're thinking about goals and objectives and tasks and everything like that, if you're not communicating how that relates to the overall big picture, or you're just not clear about what needs to be done, you're going to have an issue where the employee is trying to figure it out.
sh. So as a leader, your job [:That lack of clarity points to a communication gap. So if you have communication gaps throughout your organization where dots aren't being connected for everybody that comes into the organization, and even for those folks who are pretty experienced within the organization, you're going to.
Deal with a portion of your workforce that's going to be disengaged. You need to build that open communication culture, that open feedback culture, and that creates the space for your employees to feel like they are heard and they have a personal stake in advancing the mission and vision of the organization.
running really thin. So you [:That is the wrong mindset to have, because what's likely to happen is that if you're not having those conversations about where do you want to be from a career perspective and connecting them across the organization with other opportunities or leaders that might be able to position them to get to that next step, that employee will feel like the only path within the organization is through your silo, and they're going to look for that growth opportunity outside of the organization.
arketing them internally for [:Another way that a lack of recognition can show up is that every organization has these big signpost goals or events or rewards that come up. So if you're not breaking down recognition to a weekly basis and celebrating small wins that move you closer to the big win, you're missing an opportunity to keep your employees engaged.
And if you don't have a recognition culture, I would bet that you're probably dealing with that clock puncher mentality, . One of the things that everybody forgets about, and this is especially relevant for small to midsize organizations, is work life balance. For as long as most of us have known, the mentality has been, keep your head down, work hard, you'll get the results and you'll move up.
y is on. So you need to make [:So when you think about why employees get disengaged, nothing that I mentioned is rocket science. These are simple things that you can put into your environment tomorrow. Just be disciplined about executing .
The downstream impact of that is that you're not going to be dealing with the constant talent attraction hamster wheel where people come in, they get burnt out, they leave, they never really get fully locked into their job and you're constantly in this hire and train cycle.
You don't want that and it's extremely expensive. So it's critical that you focus on these simple things to make sure that you're getting the most out of your team and that's going to Put you on the path to becoming an elite organization.
