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Passionate Workers Are Likely To Drive Organizations Forward – Oh Really?
By TWilson | August 3, 2007
Last year the Gallup Organization released a study about employees being engaged. Their findings came up with three types of employees:
- Engaged – employees that work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. These employees drive innovation and move the organization forward
- Not-Engaged – employees have checked out, they’re sleepwalking through their workday putting in time but not energy or passion into their work
- Actively Disengaged – employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.
Let’s not dwell on the obvious facts of the survey about how engaged employees are more likely to find creative ways of solving customer problems. I believe – no I know that most of us come in contact with Not-Engaged and Actively Disengaged employees every day. When’s the last time you’ve gone to a McDonald’s or Wendy’s? If the people working there are not sleepwalking then I don’t what sleepwalking is. How many times do you have to repeat your order? Think I’m kidding, next time you order something tell them it’s to go see if you don’t get your food served to you on a tray.
Those actively disengaged work at the airlines and Wal-Mart. $Wal-Mart advertises in their store that if there are more than five people in line they will open another register, that’s a blatant lie. I’ve been behind fifteen people with at least ten other registers empty and no one insight to come over and open another one. According to the Gallup study, the cost of disengagement is around $370 billion. You have to wonder what it is about the job these people don’t like that causes them to behave in the manner they do. It can’t be because the planets aren’t in alignment because that does happen on a frequent basis.
One can argue that having a passion for what you do will cause you to get excited about your work, but if you work for a manager that is in category 2 or 3, how long will that passion last? I think we need to work on the managers and supervisors to find out what is causing them to become disengaged and move them into jobs they can get excited about or move them out. Let’s face it at $370 billion we can’t keep having people sleepwalking on the job. It’s too high a price to pay.
Topics: ACTing Right, Accountability |
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