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Home > Management Training Articles > Corporate Workforce Management
Corporate Human Capital Management
The Honeymoon Is Over! 22 Million Workers Are Divorced
From Their Jobs
by Eva Jenkins
There is a nationwide concern about America’s “divorce
rate,” but they’re not talking about matrimony. “The
increasing number of American workers who are divorced from their
jobs and completely disengaged from their work is shocking,”
says Eva Jenkins of VIP Innovations. “More than that, it’s
costing businesses a fortune in lost productivity and revenue.”
Dismissing charges that 21st Century workers are slackers or possess
an un-business like sense of entitlement, the blame squarely should
be placed on the shoulders of ineffectual human resources management
and managers. Disengaged employees aren’t born that way. They’re
created by ineffective, badly trained managers and lack of strong
human resource management within corporations.
Instead of matching the right employee to the right position for
long-term success, most companies and H/R departments put the emphasis
on simply filling the position as quickly as possible. As a result,
American businesses are losing money as fast as they’re losing
employees. Each staff turnover cuts into the bottom line.
Gallup and Galloping Disinterest Jenkins is not the only employment
professional ringing the alarm bell. The statistics on workforce
engagement are shocking. The Gallup Management Journal's semi-annual
Employee Engagement Index reports that 54% of employees are not
engaged, and 17% are actively disengaged at work and only 29% are
actively engaged.
What does this mean to American businesses?
There are 22 million actively disengaged employees in America, according
to another Gallup statistic. Their dissatisfaction is manifested
in employee absence, illness, and a variety of other big and small
problems that occur when people are unhappy at work.
Unfortunately for their employers, when people are unhappy, they
let you know it in a million different ways. They create problems
with co-workers and customers alike, and can demoralize an entire
operation.
Ultimately, disengaged employees can undermine a business and put
it on the fast track to being out-of-business. It is therefore essential
for managers and H/R professionals to refine their hiring process
by expanding their methodology and using whole-person assessment
tools.
The Peter Principle Lives On Jenkins says two key features characterize
a whole-person assessment. “A manager needs to look at whether
the candidate is a good match for the job in terms of hard skills,”
she explains. “But it’s also important to make sure
that it’s a soft skills match, too…that the candidate’s
interest and personal goals and needs will be met by the work itself
and they will fit into the corporate culture.”
Unless a company defines success in a job, and in an organization,
it cannot hire, retain or grow their own workforce successfully.
Rather than being terminated themselves, bad managers are continually
being promoted. Soon they’re victims of the Peter Principle.
The Peter Principle is a theory put forth by Dr. Laurence J. Peter
in 1969. It states that employees within a hierarchical organization
advance to their highest level of competence, are then promoted
to a level where they are incompetent, and then stay in that position
because they no longer merit advancement.
With incompetent managers at the top and in control of hiring practices,
this scenario spells disaster for staffing.
$350 Billion Lost The impact of employee disengagement is a bottom
line issue. Gallup statistics show that unhappy workers cost the
American business economy up to $350 billion annually in lost productivity!
“This is an urgent problem and businesses that don’t
address their own role in the problem are doomed,” says Jenkins.
The problem affects both companies and disengaged employees.
Many outstanding employees end up leaving an organization feeling
lost and beaten down. After a bad work experience, it’s hard
for even the most competent workers to re-define their own purpose
and rebuild their self-confidence. As a result, outstanding workers
become “stuck” and find they have difficulty making
a decision about their next position.
The Honeymoon Is Over and Workers Are No Longer Married to Their
Jobs Jenkins is clear that she feels “Bad management and bad
leadership create a destructive culture where people will not thrive!”
She points out that the vast majority of workers accept new positions
with excitement and interest. “People are generally thrilled
to land a new position and are ready to give their all to success.”
Sadly, that enthusiasm quickly gives way to apathy when employees
feel they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. HR departments
or hiring managers don’t take the time to match employees
to their positions on all levels – professional and personal.
Trickle Down Blame Upper management is also to blame for the problem.
Hiring managers know very little about their own employees due to
their own tremendous workload. Additionally, today’s corporate
culture does not encourage managers to get to know their employees
before they’re hired and does not emphasize interaction after
they’re hired.
Many businesses fail to focus on employee development, training
and retention at any level, including managers. “Companies
don’t realize how important it is to give their managers the
tools and training they need to do their jobs, too,” says
Jenkins.
Time Badly Spent Since they haven’t received proper training,
many managers themselves do not know what it takes to succeed in
a particular role nor do they have an incentive to care. More often
than not, the focus and emphasis of the H/R department is “putting
out fires.”
For the average manager, the bulk of a workday is spent working
with employees who are negative, completely disengaged and should
be terminated because they shouldn’t have been hired in the
first place.
Know When To Hold ‘Em and Know When To Fire ‘Em Jenkins
is quick to point out that “not all employees can, or should,
be saved.” She says that those who are actively disengaged
may thrive on the negativity and refuse to become part of any solution,
preferring to perpetual problems.
As workers increasingly rely on each other to generate products
and services, the problems and tensions that are fostered by actively
disengaged workers can cause great damage to an organization's functioning.
“If an employee repeatedly refuses opportunities to engage
again, terminating their employment should be seriously considered,”
says Jenkins.
Last Resort Termination is often necessary in order to avoid further
damage to staff morale and remove obstacles to organizational progress.
The solution is a flawed one, at best, since a tremendous amount
of money is lost every time a new employee needs to be found, hired,
and trained.
A more effective approach is the development of in-depth hiring
processes that will result in the right people being selected from
the start. Once the right people are in place, managers need to
work to keep employees interested and engaged so that they’re
stay in place.
Jenkins advises that all management supervisory training programs
include Employee Retention Workshops. “From my perspective,
Employee Retention Training should be a full course within the MBA
Leadership Programs,” she says. Expectations, Clarification
and Measurement To grow and sustain employee engagement, managers
must regularly provide expectations, clarification, and measurement
to employees. A good place to start is with conversations about
expectations for every person in a given role.
It’s important that managers strive to get each employee to
view his or her role from a broader perspective instead of from
a narrow task-oriented point of view. Managers often overlook the
value of making an employee feel part of the big picture and encouraging
that person to see how his or her work contributes to the future
success of the company.
“The objective is to focus employees on outcomes as well as
the steps it takes to get there,” explains Jenkins. The change
of focus allows employees to become goal-oriented rather than task-oriented
and to enjoy a sense of achievement when goals are reached…and
surpassed!”
Getting to Know You For great managers, the path toward engaging
employees and keeping them engaged begins with asking them what
they want and what they need in order to be effective in their roles.
Good managers need to get to know their employees better than the
employees know themselves!
To achieve this, management needs to define competencies for each
job, division and the company as a whole. A sound hiring/selection
process and finely honed assessment methodology will provide the
foundation.
With the this type of hiring strategy, research shows that companies
raise the odds by more than 75% that managers will make the right
hiring decisions. Instead of simply filling a position, they’ll
bring in qualified, productive, engaged workers who feel they have
a stake in the business and its success.
Give The People What They Want Jenkins recommends that a business
“assess, measure, survey and train the entire organization”
to create a company-wide culture that “prioritizes employee
engagement at every level.”
There’s one expressed desire that frequently surprises managers
and H/R people: many of the survey participants said they wanted
to be challenged by their jobs. “In other words, employees
don’t want to sleepwalk their way through the workday,”
says Jenkins. They want to matter…make a contribution…make
a difference.
“And that,” says Jenkins, “is the very definition
of being engaged!”
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