How Inaction Leads to Increased Employee Disengagement

When employees are actively engaged, they become champions of your company culture and collaborate actively across departments in innovative ways.

But employee engagement isn’t a binary; it’s a spectrum.

Employees can be actively engaged with their work and your organization. Or they might not be engaged at all, meaning they’re still getting their work done, but they won’t go out of their way to innovate or take on additional tasks. Finally, you have actively disengaged employees, who actively avoid responsibilities and are more consistently absent than their coworkers, often with no valid reason.

Some employees might be inherently negative and halfway out the door. But in the vast majority of cases, your organization’s inaction can be a direct cause of employees feeling undervalued and unmotivated, leading them to become actively disengaged. By simply maintaining the status quo and not actively pursuing employee engagement efforts, disengaged employees don’t change, and engaged employees slide further down towards being disengaged.

Disengaged employees don’t just struggle in their own work. Their negative outlook on their work and your organization can seriously impact important projects, increase employee turnover, and even affect your company culture as a whole. You’ll have a harder time hiring the right people, keeping them on, and growing sustainably.

That’s why proactive action is so important.

Key Takeaways:

• Your organization’s inaction erodes employee trust and motivation.
• Employee disengagement worsens when employees feel unheard and unappreciated.
• Disengaged employees typically display negative attitudes towards their work and their employer, as well as rarely taking on additional responsibilities.
• Rampant employee disengagement can seriously impair productivity and jeopardize important business outcomes.
• Proactive leadership and employee engagement initiatives can detect disengagement before it becomes a greater problem and mitigate the impacts of disengaged employees.

Is organizational inaction impacting employee performance?

In short, yes.

Employee performance is deeply affected by employee engagement. According to a meta-analysis from Gallup, the performance gap between organizations with the highest employee engagement levels and those with the least engagement is massive. Low-engagement organizations saw 81% more absenteeism, 64% more safety incidents, 41% lower quality (in products and other outputs), and 23% less profitability. With the right data, you can draw a direct link between disengaged employees and the business outcomes that matter most to your organization.

Employees can grow disengaged for a variety of reasons, from a lack of career development to shoddy work-life balance or even just a mismatch between an employee’s role and their abilities. Some of these causes can be deeply personal, while others are caused by organizational issues.

But how does organizational inaction directly lead to disengaged employees?

Key ways inaction leads to employee disengagement

Your organization might not control everything that can lead to employees feeling disengaged, but sticking to the status quo can lead to those areas where you do have control contributing negatively to employee engagement. Actively engaged employees slide into more neutral territory, neutral employees grow disengaged, and disengaged employees leave.

Many organizations invest just enough in their HR function to keep employee turnover at a reasonable level, maintain existing policies, and keep communication channels open between leadership and the workforce. But inaction—an absence of proactive employee engagement initiatives—can lead to serious disengagement. Here’s how that inaction typically manifests:

• Lack of leadership response: How does your organization respond to employee frustrations? Do you respond at all? A continued lack of acknowledgement and action from leadership about important employee issues will be noticed and contribute to disengagement.
• Lack of growth opportunities: Employees don’t need yearly promotions to feel engaged, but they do need to feel a sense of upward momentum in their careers. If you don’t have a system in place to actively help them build skills they’re interested in, even when promotions aren’t available, you’ll see more disengagement.
• Inconsistent feedback: Employees need feedback to know what they’re doing well and where they need to improve. But if you’re using outdated annual reviews as the main source of employee feedback, your teams aren’t getting what they need to keep improving.
• Little recognition: A culture of kudos and employee recognition makes employees feel valued and appreciated. In organizations that don’t go out of their way to make employee recognition a priority, employee disengagement is a lot more likely.
• Ignoring employee well-being: High-stress, high-pressure work environments are unavoidable in some industries. But whether an organization does nothing to mitigate this or artificially creates a high-stress work environment through toxic expectations, employee engagement is sure to decline.
• Poor communication and transparency: Communication isn’t just essential when collaborating at the same level of your org chart. Transparent communication from leaders to employees—and vice versa—is crucial for keeping everyone aligned on your mission, living your company values, and engaged with their work.

Organizational inaction can be felt by every employee if it goes on long enough, and it will absolutely have a debilitating effect on employee engagement. Proactive employee engagement initiatives don’t just move your organization to action; they show employees that they matter and that you’re ready to make their work more engaging.

But before we get into what organizations can do about employee disengagement, let’s identify clear signs of disengagement so you know when it’s time to act.

The warning signs of disengaged and unhappy employees

Actively disengaged employees are more than just a little negative or quiet. They are completely misaligned with your mission—and even your core values—in a way that doesn’t just impact their work, but their whole team’s work. In some cases, a single disengaged employee can impact an entire department.

Here are some warning signs to identify disengaged employees:

• Decreased productivity and motivation: If a top performer’s productivity starts to slip and you can’t attribute it to any other factors, it’s likely a sign of growing disengagement.
• Withdrawal from team activities and collaboration: Team activities and collaboration on important projects can build tighter bonds between team members. If teams don’t seem interested in either pursuit, they may not be feeling particularly engaged at work.
• Increased absenteeism or lateness: Everyone misses a day of work every so often. Everyone shows up late once in a while. Employees who are repeatedly late or absent are usually not the most engaged with their work.
• Negative attitudes toward leadership or company initiatives: Engaged employees are often the most critical of leadership or company initiatives because they care deeply about your mission. Disengaged employees have a negative attitude towards your leaders and their work without offering anything constructive.
• Declining quality of work or missed deadlines: The telltale symptom of a disengaged employee is their work. Whether they’re a high performer or not, you’ll see a clear decline in what they’re able to get done and how long it takes them.

As we’ve already seen, employee disengagement can have a massive impact on your organization. Disengaged employees often leave if things don’t change, increasing turnover. But their disengagement can spread to others, bringing down previously-engaged employees, slowing down important projects, and tanking productivity throughout your organization. Teams become inefficient, projects become costly, and you might even lose your best talent.

But a disengaged employee doesn’t have to remain that way—or become a former employee. A robust employee engagement plan, starting with your HR function but radiating throughout your organization, can turn things around.

How to prevent employee disengagement in the workplace

Choosing action over inaction is the first step. From there, it’s about brainstorming, implementing, and improving on initiatives that build employee engagement while addressing the root causes of disengagement. Some examples of tried-and-true employee engagement initiatives include:

• Implementing employee feedback loops: Employee concerns that go unanswered for too long lead to disengagement. In most organizations, leaders just aren’t aware of these concerns, and would address them if they were. Regular feedback loops ensure these concerns are spotted and addressed.
• Offering professional growth opportunities: No employee wants to feel like they’re stagnating in their role. Even if you can’t offer every employee a path to a promotion every year, give them ways to develop their skills, to grow within their role, and to find new opportunities.
• Recognize and reward employee contributions: Build employee recognition into your company culture. When employees, managers, and leaders are incentivized to recognize and publicize each other’s accomplishments, morale will improve for everyone.
• Enhance workplace communication: Transparency is key to employee engagement. Encourage leaders to implement open-door policies, so employees can openly share their opinions and learn why certain decisions are made. Similarly, leaders can openly communicate important updates.
• Prioritize well-being: Promoting mental health, work-life balance, and other forms of wellness should be a priority at your organization. Demonstrate this with initiatives like increasing paid time off, helping working parents through daycare days, providing a wellness benefit, or raising awareness of common mental health issues.

No matter what you choose to implement, remember that preventing employee disengagement is an ongoing effort. You need to evaluate the impact of your initiatives, adjust them over time, and improve on them.

Keep people engaged and you’ll reap the rewards

Organizations have a direct hand in improving employee engagement, and inaction can lead to significant disengagement. Employee disengagement doesn’t just bring morale down for a few employees. It can impact productivity, increase turnover, and lead to important deadlines being missed. This all culminates in serious consequences for your business.

Proactive employee engagement initiatives and leadership intervention allow your organization to identify the signs of disengagement and act on them. Initiatives like wellness benefits, rewarding employee contributions, and implementing feedback loops can all nip employee disengagement in the bud. Having the right performance platform can streamline implementation and give you valuable data for gauging the effectiveness of these initiatives.

Engage from 15Five gives data-driven HR teams everything they need to know what’s impacting engagement at their organization, where they need to take action, and how impactful their efforts are.

Want to learn more? Explore our customer stories to see how 15Five has helped HR teams at over 3,000 companies get results.