The Disease of Disengagement

The reason companies should care about engagement is simple: disengaged workers waste millions of dollars per year whereas engaged employees create millions in profit per year.

Consider the case study from Molson Coors Brewing Company.[i] The beverage company focused on engaging employees and the results were the following:

• Engaged employees were five times less likely than disengaged employees to have a safety incident and seven times less likely to have a lost-time safety incident.
• The average cost of a safety incident for engaged employees was $63, compared with an average of $392 for disengaged employees.
• The company saved $1,721,760 in safety costs during 2002.
• Low-engagement teams fell far behind engaged teams in 2005 sales volumes.

The difference in performance-related costs of low- vs. high-engagement teams totaled $2,104,823. Losing on average two million dollars per year is a very big reason why organizations should care about disengagement.

The reason that most organizations continue losing thousands to millions of dollars from disengagement year after year is because they don’t realize how many of their employees are actually disengaged.

In the What’s Working survey from the consulting company Mercer, nearly 30,000 workers were surveyed from 17 countries in order to address this very issue.[ii] The survey found that 50% of employees are not happy at their job. Additionally, the findings indicate that within the US, 32% of workers are seriously considered leaving the firm, up from 23% in 2005. 21% of employees are not considering leaving but have an unfavorable view of their employers and score very low on measures of engagement. These statistics shock most organizations since the number of disengaged workers within the company is much higher than most employers expect.

If many employers are not fully aware of the amount of disengagement in the office, most likely they are not aware of the negative effects that trickle down from disengagement. “The business consequences of this erosion in employee sentiment are significant, and clearly the issue goes far beyond retention,” states Mindy Fox, a Senior Partner at Mercer and the firm’s US Region Leader. “Diminished loyalty and widespread apathy can undermine business performance, particularly as companies increasingly look to their workforces to drive productivity gains and spur innovation,” Fox explains.

Psychologists have studied disengagement and have defined it as the state where the employee separates himself or herself emotionally, psychologically, and even physically from work. The characteristics of disengagement include passive behavior, emotional absence, withdrawn tendencies, and a lack of connectedness.[iii]

Most people are familiar with this state because they have personally experienced disengagement. Think about a job you have been in when you weren’t satisfied. How interested were you in completing your tasks and responsibilities? Was it a major effort just to force you to get started on a project? How good did calling in sick to avoid going into work sound? These are all common symptoms of experiencing disengagement at work, and disengagement is the precursor to more serious issue including job burnout, turnover, and presenteeism.

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