Research Works recently released a series of reports from the Partnership for Workplace Mental Health, a program of the American Psychiatric Foundation. Download them here.
Research Works found that about a quarter of all employees are “actively disengaged,” meaning they don’t care about about their jobs at all. These are the people who don’t make much of an effort to help a customer with a problem, or a colleague with an issue. Or do anything beyond the minimum required (or what they can get away with).
Twenty-five per cent! That’s an awful lot of employees just taking up space.
Culling information from a number of studies, the report found that about 20% of employees are “highly engaged” and about 55% are in the middle — meaning they work hard but don’t live and die by going to work every day.
The rest, about 25%, could be toxic to your company’s success.
How engaged are your employees? If you don’t know, it might be costing you money.
Best Buy, for example, found that stores where employee engagement was increased even slightly “experienced annual sales increases of over $100,000 per store,” according to the report. J.C. Penney, too, found that stores across its chain that reported a higher number of engaged employees generated sales about 10% higher than others.
That’s real money, and getting your employees more engaged is something that doesn’t have to cost your company, large or small, a lot of money, or anything at all.
Many management books can tell you how to measure employee engagement, but most HR experts will tell you that there is no one-size-fits-all method to doing it. The key is knowing your people and being able to critically examine your own management style.
It would be too easy to now give you a list a few “things to do”. It isn’t as simple as that. We believe a framework of engaging talent is needed. See what we recommend to deal with “The Talent Challenge“.