One of the most destructive PLOTs is disengagement, and Gallup's now-famous study on Employee Engagement provides objective and conclusive proof that the problem is far worse than most companies believe. Up to 80% of employees are disengaged from their company...80%! That means that roughly 4 out of 5 employees are either apathetic to the success of the company they work for, or are actively working to sabotage their employer! Competition is bad enough, but how can any company or organization prosper against such opposition in their own culture?
Some executives recognize the dangers of a culture that fosters such negativity and are pro-actively working to purge their company of such influences. A friend who owns a medium-sized firm selling intangible goods based on commission sales, wrote the other day that he was firing his most productive employee. The employee in question was his top income earner and top producer, but the chaos he created among his fellow employees was so great that if more than offset his personal production. His numbers were sky-high but the rest of the sales force's numbers were lagging, both because of Mr. Top Guy's negativity and the difficulty he generated in finding and keeping good sales people. He had been warned repeatedly that he was disrupting the workplace but ignored the warnings. In the end, his production could not offset he disengagement he created in everybody else.
Many employers are not quite so savvy. Yahoo! Finance recently published a list of the Worst Places to Work in America, based on reviews written at Glassdoor.com. (Link at the bottom) These companies are a Who's Who of Disengaged Employees, but one quote about Frontier Communications really stuck out: "“The reason you can't hire is that no one wants to work on a dinosaur.”
Yikes! This harkens back to the story in a previous entry about the man killing his employees with work whose answer to turnover and disengagement was to double-down on everything he was already doing wrong. If Frontier is so far behind the curve on their corporate culture that their employees see them as extinct, how likely are they to keep their best employees, much less attract the best new talent? They have to take whatever they can get, which is simply not going to be the best and brightest, who are most likely to be engaged with their success. Instead, they are probably settling for the worst and dimmest in many cases, because they need a body to fill a space. Productivity, engagement, and other measurements of a successful employee become secondary when you have to hire whoever you can, which is the very definition of PLOTs.
There is a broad answer, although details are specific to each company. Positive Innovation leads to Greater Engagement which leads to Higher Productivity: Innovate, Engage, Produce, the Triangle of Recovered Revenues.
Next time: Part Two of The High Cost of Disengaged Employees
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/america-worst-companies-152240176.html
