Some years ago, a group of executives met to discuss their company’s employee engagement strategy. The company was under pressure. Its stock was down. Its key products were at risk of being commoditized.
To maintain margins, the business had done a wave of layoffs. Leadership told the employees no further layoffs were anticipated. However, not long thereafter, when results again were disappointing, and under pressure from the board of directors, the company ordered more people terminated.
Not surprising, this took a toll on the morale of the surviving workers, many of whom recently saw valued colleagues given pink slips, saw little upside at the company, or worried about the security of their own jobs. Although some undoubtedly inflated their survey responses out of fear, many also responded candidly. Given all that had occurred, they were worn out.
One of the executives didn’t appreciate the candor. “Disengaged employees are like a cancer; they should be cut out,” he told the rest of the executive team.
His sentiment was unusual only for the fact that he admitted it so publicly. Some executives—those with the nicest offices, making the policies others must follow, paid many multiples more than those they supervise—are bothered that their people aren’t perfectly chipper regardless of the emotionally grinding circumstances. And the execs freak out just as some engagement advisors hope they will when those consultants use descriptions of the “actively disengaged” that are both hyperbolic and wrong.
In many quarters, “disengaged” has come to mean not that the employee made a wrong turn into the clutches of a cruddy manager, but that he has a character flaw. The symptoms are confused with the disease. “A disengaged workforce,” wrote Cass Business School Professor Stefan Stern, “is a silent killer as far as companies are concerned.”
Gallup vilifies the “actively disengaged” as “busy acting out their unhappiness.” “Every day,” it claims, “these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.” Globoforce included among its profiles of “five famously disengaged employees” the traitors Brutus and Benedict Arnold. “In retrospect, good practices around recognition, culture management, and talent management would have made a big difference for these employees,” it said.
The most “disengaged” are “corporate terrorists,” claims one self-described “HR pro” and blogger. These people “are the ones trying to sabotage everything you’re trying to do,” he asserts. “Your goal should be to remove the terrorists every time you catch them planting the cultural equivalent of an IED.” These insults are an amateurish smear job.
Imagine a person works for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, drawn to it by fictional spy movies and its very real mission to “preempt threats and further U.S. national security objectives by collecting intelligence that matters.” Suppose that over the course of several years, the spy finds, as one wrote on Glassdoor.com, that “the best and worst employees were treated exactly the same in many cases” and that “many levels of management are almost uniformly awful.” Or perhaps he just burns out on travel to hostile or dangerous countries and “having to lie to everyone about what you do for a living and how your day was at work.”
Is he “cancer?” Is he a cultural “terrorist,” planting workplace “improvised explosive devices” among his colleagues? Is he “acting out his unhappiness?” Is he “undermining what his engaged coworkers accomplish?” Is he Benedict Arnold?
Of course, not. That would be treason. He is simply reacting naturally to the conditions in which he finds himself. In workplaces where the mission is far less crucial, “undermining” and planting metaphorical IEDs might not be criminal, but would still be irresponsible at best. The vast majority of people are better than that, even when they become frustrated or demoralized. As one astute executive quipped, “It’s not like they want to be disengaged.”
In the New Rules of Engagement studies we conducted, people on the high end of the engagement scale—people whose companies are following the rules well—score high on every indicator of commitment to and intensity for their employers. Obligation to work hard? Wanting to stay? Planning to stay? Willingness to work hard for customers? Looking for ways to improve the way they work? Delivering their best ideas? Recommending the company as a great place to work? All of them are not only high, but close to pegging the meter.
As would be expected, the more a company fails to follow the New Rules, the more each of these intentions fades. However, each does not fall off at the same rate.
Wanting to stay and recommending the company as a great place to work are the first casualties of poor leading and managing. An employee’s best ideas disappear at nearly the same pace. As conditions degrade, being proud of working for the company slides and wanting to work somewhere else increasingly converts itself into real plans to leave.
Three key intentions prove the most resilient to mediocre or poor leadership and managing. The obligation to work as hard as possible fights back against frustrating conditions, as does an employee’s determination to find better ways to work. And the last thing an employee surrenders to a bad employer? “I am willing to work especially hard for my organization’s customers” averages well on the positive side of the scale even as the employee’s rating of conditions is negative.
Frustrated or demoralized employees often say they still believe in the kind of work their organization does, they want to deliver high-quality work, even if they don’t see it coming from the rest of the enterprise, and they do not believe customers or clients should suffer because of the situation in which they find themselves. But the lack of support eventually wears them down. As one person who finally had surrendered to poor conditions told the research team, “I do not feel challenged. I feel like my work is meaningless.”
What these patterns indicate is a much higher degree of maturity, sense of responsibility, and professionalism in the reputedly “actively disengaged” than companies and consultancies have attributed to them. Some consultants tally the “cost of disengaged workers” when they should be calling it the “cost of disengaging your workers”—a minor edit with major implications. The blame-the-victim assumptions only make it more likely people will pretend to be engaged right up until the day they give their notice, and allow the true causes of frustration and demoralization to fester inside a firm.
The choice of what kinds of attitudes your employees bring to work is yours. Because people so strongly reciprocate what they receive, a company gets the engagement it deserves. Because engagement is so closely tied to results, a company also gets the performance it deserves.
Adapted from “Widgets: The 12 New Rules for Managing Your Employees as If They’re Real People” by Rodd Wagner (McGraw-Hill, April 2015).
Rodd Wagner is one of the foremost authorities on employee engagement and collaboration. He serves as vice president of employee engagement strategy at BI Worldwide and is the author of Widgets: The 12 New Rules for Managing Your Employees As If They’re Real People (McGraw-Hill; April 2015).
