Every large organization has them – the disengaged middle. This can include employees who are working as hard as they can to fly under the radar and do as little as possible. It also includes employees who have become disengaged for other reasons. And it includes a group commonly referred to as the “frozen middle” – stagnant middle managers.
How can you find this disengaged middle in your organization? And just as importantly, how can you re-engage them?
There are two crucial elements to achieving these goals. The first is to understand employee engagement and what you can do to get engagement going in the right direction again. The second is to identify the disengaged middle and monitor progress as part of supporting employees as they make improvements.
The second element requires data that can only be provided with an advanced workplace monitoring solution such as WatchPoint Digital.
By re-igniting engagement, you can unlock the full potential of your existing workforce. Not only that, but you can also extract productivity gains that are disproportionately greater than the investment and effort required to identify and re-engage the disengaged middle.
What is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is often confused with employee satisfaction, but both are different concepts. Employee engagement is the connection and commitment an employee has to their work and their team, and to the organization’s goals.
Employee engagement is cognitive, physical, and emotional.
Why is Employee Engagement So Difficult to Track?
There are a number of reasons that make employee engagement difficult to track. If it’s difficult to track, it is also difficult to identify where disengagement exists.
Simply observing employees, for example, is ineffective, not least because it is subjective and inefficient, i.e., one manager might not focus on employee engagement much, another could have a strict definition, while another’s definition could be much more flexible.
When employees spend a lot of their time working at a computer, identifying problems with engagement becomes even more challenging. After all, the physical actions of an employee working productively at a computer are not much different from those of an employee who is not doing very much.
Initiatives such as employee engagement surveys don’t tell the full story either, as the sentiments expressed in surveys can be inaccurate and/or misaligned with what the company expects. For example, an employee’s assessment of a normal level of engagement can be different from the view of the company. Employees might also give answers that make them look better, not least because of the potential (or perceived) repercussions of telling the truth.
Focus on Outcomes
The aim of identifying the disengaged middle should be to re-engage as many of them as possible.
It’s also important to highlight that identifying and dealing with disengagement is not about identifying every drop in performance. After all, nobody can operate at maximum efficiency every single day. Productivity is never 99% ± 1.
In fact, being too busy is counterproductive as it leads to burnout.
Optimizing engagement should be about monitoring trends over time and positively intervening when issues are identified. This means supporting employees to fill their time with work that adds value rather than being buried in remedial or busy work.
Busy work is where employees focus on tasks that fill time and keep them occupied, but do not add value. It is work that is often task-heavy but results-light.
The Workplace Monitoring Three-Step Solution to Employee Disengagement
Step 1 – Identify the Disengaged Middle
Workplace monitoring software can accurately identify a lack of engagement in your workforce. It does this by assessing metrics such as:
- Active time vs. idle time
- Changes in productivity trends over time
- Assessing whether employees are engaged in value-adding work or busy work
- Changes in communication patterns, such as fewer emails
- Deviations from established good work patterns.
Our workplace monitoring software at WatchPoint can also help you identify early indications of potential disengagement, i.e., before the disengagement starts to have a tangible impact on productivity. Examples of early indicators include a lack of focus or inefficient working practices.
Step 2 – Understand the Disengagement
The starting point for understanding disengagement is the data. Share this data with the employee and explore the root causes. By sharing the data, you will also help the employee better understand their level of disengagement and the impact it is having.
It is also important to look at the layer above to understand the root causes of the disengagement. This particularly applies when dealing with disengaged middle managers.
Are the bosses of disengaged middle managers creating an environment that encourages innovation, creativity, and a commitment to continuous improvement? Is the disengagement caused by change projects that have inadequate buy-in? Are influential senior leaders saying one thing (the right thing) but doing another (the wrong thing)?
If a situation like the above applies, take steps to change the context in addition to working with and supporting the disengaged employee.
Step 3 – Reignite Engagement
Positive influence and inclusive leadership are needed to re-engage employees and get them back to a good level of productivity. To give this type of leadership, focus on performance and outcomes. This includes identifying where improvements can be made.
Setting goals is also important, and make sure you are clear on your expectations.
Providing authentic and practical wellbeing support is also essential.
It is then important to continue monitoring the employee’s engagement using the data from the workplace monitoring software. Share this data with the employee, highlight areas of progress, and celebrate improvements. This positive, data-driven approach will generate the best response, helping you unlock the employee’s potential.
Employee Engagement Won’t Look After Itself
Employee engagement is a management issue that won’t go away and won’t look after itself. By leaving it unattended, you will have employees not delivering value, impacting productivity. This can also demotivate other members of the team, leading to burnout and employee turnover rates that are higher than they should be. Workplace monitoring software is key to the solution of identifying and re-engaging disengaged employees. To get a demo of the WatchPoint Digital workplace monitoring solution, please get in touch.
