Your Greatest Competitive Advantage

Question: What costs American businesses over 300 billion dollars annually?
Answer: Disengaged employees.
According to extensive studies conducted by Gallup Management Journal, only 29% of employees are engaged in their work. 54% are disengaged (mentally checked out) and 17% are actively disengaged (sabotaging the efforts of their co-workers). What’s more, Gallup has determined that the only source of this problem of employee disengagement is bad managers!
This means that if your company is like most, every million dollars you spend on payroll, gets you $290,000 worth of effort! It also means that if you invest in nothing else, you should invest in your managers (or if you are a manager, invest in yourself). Helping your managers become better leaders will increase the level of employee engagement in your company. This, in turn, will cause increases in productivity, efficiency, profit, and will also help you retain valuable customers. Guaranteed!
The greatest advantage any business could have over their competition is not their product, but their engaged employees. Through their studies, Gallup found that more than half of disengaged employees will never recommend their employers’ product or service to others, but most of the engaged employees would. Since most of your competitors are likely suffering from disengaged employees, it would obviously serve your bottom line very well to make the effort to engage your people. There should be absolutely no incentive to have these disengaged people on your payroll.
Question: Can disengaged people appear to be productive?
Answer: I’ve come across some sales people in companies who seem to bring in enough money to make their bosses want to keep them in spite of showing signs of disengagement. Sales managers never seem to care about the attitude as long as the numbers are good. That, however, is a deadly mistake. Most sales people are very money driven and therefore create the impression of being engaged when they are producing great sales results. Ironically, they would be absolutely phenomenal if they were actually engaged.
Keep in mind that revenue is not the measure of engagement, attitude is. Money does not affect employee engagement, culture does. If your high sales performers are always complaining about company policy, inept delivery or service people, and the lack of support, for example, then your sales person is simply motivated by money. As a sales manager or business owner, you may think that is good enough, but beware. He is in the game solely for his own benefit, not the benefit of the company, and that is deadly.
Remember, disengaged employees are not loyal. Your disengaged high sales performer will take off with your customers at the earliest opportunity. You are not doing your business any favours by keeping him or her amongst your ranks. You are simply delusional if you think your business will steadily thrive with these people around. They are working on bringing your other sales reps over to the dark side, sabotaging their morale and success all the way. Not all sales people are solely motivated by money, and this performer will ruin the others.
Question: How can I determine whether or not my employees are engaged?
Answer: There are some obvious signs of disengagement which include actions like complaining to co-workers, apathy, frequently missed deadlines, absenteeism, tardiness, lack of interest in company events, etc.
The best way to determine the level of employee engagement in your company is to conduct a survey. I use an employee engagement survey to help my clients see where they are and where they need to improve. I also conduct workshops and coaching sessions to show leaders how to build an engaged workforce. Engaging employees is the only way to have lasting success in business. Any results achieved in spite of having a disengaged workforce pale when compared to the results that occur when your people are engaged.

Contact: renee@powerconferences.ca www.powerconferences.ca
An edited version of this article has been published at www.trainingmag.com