How to Motivate Disengaged Employees

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The first step is to look at symptoms: What is your employee turnover? Have your managers all been promoted from within and not gotten management training? Is absenteeism or tardiness rampant? How is employee morale? Do you dread going to work?

These are signs your engagement needs improvement.  But before you go headlong into what you think is the best fix, hire a professional organization to fully assess what is going on in your organization.  Culture is driven from the top so you need to be prepared for management’s role in disengagement to be explored.  

Transparency is at the heart of attacking the company’s disengagement so communication at all levels is key. While engagement begins at the top, middle managers and supervisors can have the most impact.  Gallup’s research shows managers do not spend enough time communicating with their direct reports. Since the quality of employees’ relationship or lack of relationship with their direct supervisor overwhelmingly determines the level of engagement, this can account for as much as 70 percent of the engagement score.

If your engagement is poor, you are not alone as Gallup statics show only 33 percent of American workers are engaged.  Once you have identified the engagement issues, you need to have an improvement plan where you set goals and measure your progress.  Changing culture and engaging employees has been shown to improve revenue and profitability, reduce accidents and provides a company where people want to work.  Are you ready to start turning your B players into A players?