Tip #452: How Much Will a Disengaged Employee Cost Your Business?

    

Whether you are looking at a sports team, business or political campaign, supporters who are not actively engaged by the charisma and content of their leader can quickly become dissatisfied dissenters who will abandon the current effort.

In the business world, losing a dissatisfied employee is more than an inconvenience. It will cost your business time and money and create a lot of aggravation. By the way, United States businesses lose $11 billion annually as a result of employee turnover according to the Bureau of National Affairs.  

5 Ways A Disengaged Employee Will Cost Your Business Money.

The primary difference between an engaged and disengaged employee is the following: The engaged employee believes that he or she can truly affect and positively change the growth of an organization. An employee lacking engagement feels insignificant, and this attitude negatively affects your business in several ways:

Click here to down our free white paper on employee engagement:Engaging Employees: What Drives Employee Engagement and Why It Matters.

1. Impact On Co-Workers: Negativity is contagious, and your disengaged employee has the potential to "infect" his or her coworkers. This has an overall negative impact on team morale and productivity.

2. Their Performance While On Company Time: As you know, time is valuable. The disengaged employee makes poor use of his or her time, costing the company money.  Often times you will find a disengaged person on their cell phone and/or surfing the Internet. 

3. Poor Customer Service: Your employees should be cheerleaders for your business and seek to make the same out of customers. However, a disengaged employee has no enthusiasm to pass on to customers.

4. Less Than Stellar Productivity: A disengaged employee is not motivated to meet goals or go the extra mile when it comes to getting work done. Additionally, an employee without sympathy may dodge phone calls, e-mails and other responsibilities.

5. Lack Of Quality In Their Work: A disengaged employee has little motivation to produce quality results. He or she may struggle with deadlines and will not seek out responsibilities or leadership roles. By contrast, an engaged workforce wants to do what is best for the company. They are generally more creative and innovative and feel loyal and emotionally connected to their work environment.

Executive Summary: The cost of a single disengaged employee may seem insignificant, but most organizations contain multiple examples of this attitude and behavior. Entire departments may feel apathetic, leading to a major productivity issue for the entire company. 

Additionally, our research has revealed that although there are many factors that affect employee engagement, it really only comes down to three key items:

1.     Relationship with someone's immediate supervisor.
2.     Senior leadership's ability to lead the company and communicate its goals.
3.     Organizational pride - vision of organization and corporate social responsibility.

For more information, visit our website!