The Cost of Employee Disengagement

[Raven]

Eric Brown has a guest post by Michael Sebastian, PhD titled: The Cost of Employee Disengagement. It's worth the read, check out this excerpt:

Anger, fear, depression and fatigue. These are the feelings of many employees today. And those emotions don’t get checked in at the door. A bad economy has many employees feeling stressed out and apathetic about their jobs, resulting in “employee disengagement.”

Employee disengagement is a fairly new business term; it used to be called employee commitment. Once considered one of those ‘touchy feely’ subjects that had many managers rolling their eyes. Today employee disengagement is silently costing US companies billions of dollars. Gallup recently estimated that employee disengagement costs US employers $300 billion every year. This statistic really validates common sense; it stands to reason that employees who are genuinely committed to their employers and jobs are more productive. Engaged or committed employees usually take fewer sick days and generate an average of 43% more revenue. This problem is often ignored because it is difficult to measure, something most managers like to do - can’t measure it can’t manage it right? But the cost is real and of particularly concern at a time when companies need maximum productivity.

Ignoring the problem is usually bad strategy any time, but particularly when the stakes are so high. Today’s organizational leader has a unique opportunity to reverse this trend...

Check out the rest of the post for some great tips on dealing with employee disengagement: http://ericbrown.com/guest-post-the-cost-of-employee-disengagement.htm

Thanks to Eric and Michael for sharing!

[Terrence Seamon]

Great guest post by Michael Sebastian. Thanks for pointing us to it, Raven.
The cost of disengagement is high. And the feelings mentioned --anger, fear, depression and fatigue-- are growing as this downturn worsens.
Terry