19Mar/103

The “Hidden Thief” Within—Disengaged Employees

While the image of the disengaged employee was captured by the actor Ron Livingston in his portrayal of “Peter Gibbons” in the movie Office Space, spotting this hidden thief within your organization may not be quite that easy. Gallup recently found that almost 70% of all workers are not actively engaged at work. These workers are costing their respective companies millions. However, they are not always to blame. I believe a large number of organizations may prevent this from happening by having a strategy that is well defined and helps tackle this costly issue. The down turn in the economy has given rise to the worker that has mentally checked out but is still collecting a paycheck. What can you do? How do you spot a disengaged worker and turn things around before it’s too late?

Here is a little insight, splashed with some humor, into 5 things that indicate your employee might be disengaged. Enjoy!

  1. Lunches get longer: Oh, three trips to the buffet line may sound like a viable excuse but it’s nothing more than putting off getting back to the office—2.5 hours later
  2. Walking around with a cell phone and a legal pad becomes common practice. If the cell phone is to the ear this is even worse. This gives the appearance of being very busy and even more so if the employee is wearing one of those cheesy cell phone holders on their belt.
  3. Reorganizing one’s office space becomes habitual
  4. Sending out emails with tips to odd bits of information that appears to be in the spirit of helping the team, but that no one really cares about, becomes a new pastime.
  5. And the real kicker—Doctors Appointments tend to be scheduled every other Friday afternoon or Monday morning.

On a serious note:  Fighting disengagement is all about hiring correctly and coaching. Learn more about how to do that using The Brooks Group's suite of assessment tools.

Filed under: Hiring / Retention Leave a comment
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  1. Mike Meikle
    March 23rd, 2010 - 14:58

    Good article. Although, employees wouldn’t be so “disengaged” if they weren’t treated with indifference. See Judith Bardwick’s book “One Foot Out the Door”.
    Don’t forget the cover sheet on your TPS Report Mr. Smith….

  2. Emil Pop
    March 24th, 2010 - 12:19

    No motivation, no job done.

    Or maybe nothing to do (really) due to chrisys, so they hang around waiting for the last minute to go home.

    Anyway, if the boss is not good enough to provide work for the employees and motivate them to do it, and pay for, decently, than before sending some nothing doers home, the first to be fired is the boss himself.

    But…

    1. the boss wants to keep his position, he has a mortgage too.

    2. the employess don’t want another boss to make them work, this one is OK, no work plus salary sound fine,

    3. thus the boss won’t really complain of his employees, and tend to hide their work attitude,

    4. Workers understand that and tend to protect their boss,

    And here the circle closes around, a vicious one.

    If instead of being paid by hour, the boss and any given subaltern, they would have to gain thir money by performances, like in a franchising system, you can bet all your savings they would find themselved something productive for the company to do any given day.

    If a work consultant advises you differently, fire the consultant first, thei’r of no good.

    Than build a reward scheme, and who does the job get’s paid, and who not, will fire themselves, you don’t even need to bother.

    Believe me, I did it, it worked, and made money.

    And now I’m doing it again.

    Need help?

  3. Tony Smith
    March 25th, 2010 - 13:43

    Mike, yes I think I did forget the TPS Report.. I just don’t understand the reason behind those and they keep me from selling kinda like CRM systems that are too cumbersome to use!–Thanks for the comment!

    Emil, I think you have some valuable insight into why a boss may ignore the situation completely! Even worse is how many bosses may be disengaged. Thanks for posting!


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