Employee Disengagement defines individuals who are disengaged, i.e. indifferent or emotionally disconnected from their organisation or employers. Achieving minimum standards, higher levels of absenteeism and low quality outputs and performance they represent an enormous burden to business.
If you care about your organisations’ health and well being, it is important to identify disengagement at your workplace and address it timely. So how do you know if employees are not engaged? Though the list of characteristic traits of disengaged employees could go on and on, here are 10 major signs to watch for in identifying disengagement at your workplace.
1. Regular Complaints
Disengaged employees are usually dissatisfied and are seen complaining about their current situation.
They may not necessarily agree with some of the things going on, or there could be more of a deeper issue that requires to be unmasked.
It could be a problem to have such employees around the workplace.
Solution : The management should try to come up with appropriate solutions to start engaging these employees more often inorder to improve the work environment.
2. Constantly Making Excuses
There’s nothing more demoralizing than a teammate who doesn’t hold their end of the bargain. A disengaged employee who makes excuses could damage the team with their lack of enthusiasm to complete tasks or participating with the team.
The fact that they make excuses to delay tasks can seriously hurt a team.
Solution : The best thing to do is have a leader counsel them to be more productive and obtain a more positive outlook when it comes to completing tasks.
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3. Not Showing Enthusiasm
Lack of enthusiasm occurs only when you aren’t necessarily happy about a situation. This is equally true about employees and their workplace. For whatever reason an employee may become disengaged, he or she is likely to not care about some of the tasks that they have to complete.
Solution : If you have a lot of employees that lack enthusiasm, consider doing things that will improve the company culture and make it a better place to work at.
4. Not Willing to Help Others
It is usually observed that disengaged employees tend to be on their own, so when the time comes to offer help, more often than not, they’ll choose not to.
Although they are particularly not unfriendly with the people around them, it’s more that they don’t want to take the time to offer anyone help because they feel better off doing their own thing.
Solution : Try organizing some team building activities at work that will encourage your disengaged employees to collaborate with their colleagues and be more involved.
5. Involved in Gossip
Gossiping is an extremely negative trait and destroys the morale and the team dynamic, and creates cliques within the company. A disengaged employee will tend to gossip and spread bad vibes around the office.
Solution : The best way to go about is to peacefully confront the person and let them know where they are going wrong.
6. Telling Lies
For whatever reason disengaged employees find it easy to lie to get out of situations or avoid things.
The absolute worst is when they lie about getting an assignment done. A solid mix of lying and making excuses can easily destroy an office. And when you have multiple employees doing this kind of thing, it can be extremely bad for your office.
Solution : Whenever you are successful in identifying this trait in any employee, become extra cautious and have a one-on-one conversation with the employee.
7. Do Not Display Growth
A disengaged employee has no motivation to grow within their company or make the most out of their position. They are usually slow learners and are found to be the least motivated.
Solution : It’s up to the leaders of a company to come up with a good strategy to motivate employees and make sure that people are aware that they can grow as long as they bring in a good attitude.
8. Think They Know-It-All
There’s nothing worse than a person who is talented and tends to act like they’re above everybody. For the same reason, these employees do not give their 100% efforts to the tasks being assigned. These personality types are the ones that ruffle feathers and upset their team members.
Having a know-it-all attitude can seriously cause damage within a workplace.
Solution : In this situation, management should try asking for more results from the employee (even if they’re completing small tasks) in order to build some momentum to make the person get better.
9. Are Usually Irresponsible
It’s a common thing to have moments where we do some irresponsible things at work.
We’ve probably forgotten to call in sick, come in late, Forget to delegate an important assignment etc. However, when being irresponsible is constant it’s not a good thing at all.
Solution : The best thing to do is probably make the person aware that their irresponsibility is bringing down the team and ask if they can improve their habits.
10. Do Not Like to Take Initiative
Disengaged employees have no initiative to take the reins on a project and be a leader within their office.
They are ok with blending in and oftentimes do not mind not having a voice.
Remember, an office is a community of people so for someone to lack initiative and not want to contribute, that person will bring down the team.
Solution : Although there’s no real way of fixing a person’s psyche, however, you can try using motivational tactics to make the disengaged person a bit more excited about their job.
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2 Responses
That was really a deep insight of management actual problems… The management face. I was really thrilled by reading the solution given for each unique problems.
great. Let’s also talk of what initiatives can be taken to get them fully engaged