Symptoms of an Employee Engagement Problem

You may observe your employees and think:

• They seem happy
• They’re positive
• They enjoy working together

That means they’re engaged, right? Not necessarily. Happiness and engagement are two very different things. An employee can seem happy but be disengaged. This can hurt productivity, profit, and client retention.

At Up Your Culture, we define employee engagement as an emotional commitment and willingness to give your best at work. When engagement is strong, employees have a powerful sense of purpose, and they feel as though they have a stake in the game. Because of this, they are willing to give everything they’ve got to achieve success and often go above and beyond what others are doing.

Are employees there to simply “collect a paycheck,” or are they all in?

Highly engaged organizations:

• Are 3x more likely to retain employees, reducing the cost of replacing people
• Achieve a 20% increase in profitability and 20% increase in sales

Employee engagement is very important, but how do you know if you have an engagement problem? What are the signs?

Symptoms of an Employee Engagement Problem

• A high level of turnover in highly talented and valuable employees
• A persistent pattern of absenteeism 
• A decrease in productivity 
• An environment that is siloed in which people don’t communicate, collaborate, or learn from one another
• A lack of innovation and sharing of new ideas. People feel stuck in the past and old way of doing things
• A decline in customer retention

If you notice any of these signs, there are a few steps you can take to begin to improve culture and engagement.

• The best way to understand whether your employees are engaged is to ask them. We recommend using an employee engagement survey to do this so you have solid data to better understand how your employees are feeling and a clear understanding of specific areas to improve.
• Next, all company leaders must commit to improving culture and engagement based on what they learned in the surveys and work together to identify specific things each person can do to improve in areas of opportunity.
• Another important step is to share the survey results with all employees to get their feedback. This will show that you value their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.

Discussing the action steps that you will take to elevate employee engagement and following through on these actions will help put you on the path to a more positive culture journey.