A recent Gallop Study showed that 20% of employees are ACTIVELY disengaged at work. Are you the cause? Management actions are a common reason for employee disengagement.
How might you undermine the work of your associates? Many leaders do when they ask for one thing on Monday and something entirely different on Friday, thus wasting the time or the efficiency of those around them.
Do you arrive late for meetings and then drag them on well beyond the scheduled end point? Everyone starts showing up late, so they can get their “real” work done.
Do you have meetings without a written agenda? No one prepares because they don’t know why you are having the meeting.
Do you throw people into projects without clearly stating the objectives? They give you what they thought you wanted and you are crazy frustrated since it is nothing like what you expected.
Do you forget to follow up or assign due dates? They will wait for you to ask for the second or third time before they start any new project.
You might say that you don’t have time for all this process. You are an entrepreneur, a get-it-done type of person. It turns out that this behavior works really well for an individual, not so well with teams. In fact, this lack of discipline and/or lack of clear communication of goals, objectives and roles can create actively disengaged people who were once engaged and productive team members within your organization. Gallop found that people are most engaged for the first 6 months in a job. Just holding on to that level of engagement would increase the average bottom line by 22%. What are you willing to change about the way you manage to get results like that?
* from Gallup’s State of the American WorkForce, Introduction by Jim Clifton