Once we’ve been intentional about creating a culture of top-down leadership that provides effective communication on an ongoing basis and we’ve worked to minimize the profitability that’s killed by high voluntary turnover and ongoing recruiting, the next—but indeed no less critical—profitability killer that needs our attention is the cost of disengaged employees. To have any real shot at doing that, we need to understand how widespread this issue truly is, how it impacts individual performance, and how each of those things ultimately affects even the best members of our teams.

But first let’s make sure we’re on the same page. I’m not suggesting we do everything we can to make our employees happy, nor do I believe we can get long-term results by simply working to ensure employee satisfaction. Employee engagement is very different from either of those things. An article on Indeed.com called “How to Improve Employee Engagement” differentiated the three like this:

"Employee engagement is a measurement of how committed an employee is to their employer, how passionate they are about the work they do and how well their personal goals and values align with the mission and objectives of their employer.

An engaged employee is enthusiastic about working with customers and providing them services that generate profit and a good reputation. Not only that, but if your company has an engaged workforce, you’re more likely to retain your current staff—instead of having to frequently spend time and money hiring new employees.

It’s important not to confuse employee engagement with employee satisfaction. While the two may sound similar, they’re actually two different concepts. A satisfied employee is someone who likes their job and feels their employer meets their needs, while an engaged employee is someone who is committed to their work, dedicated to their employer and consistently performs at a high level.

An engaged employee is always satisfied, but someone can be satisfied without being engaged. For example, an employee may be happy with the compensation and job duties, but they may not be emotionally connected to their work or loyal to their employer."

With that perspective in mind, we need to understand the widespread lack of engagement. Over the decade or so that I had hands-on involvement with doing employee engagement surveys, the message most frequently shared with me was that in the best organizations in the world, close to 20 percent of their workforce was actively disengaged, and around 30 percent of their team was actively engaged. The analogy I’ve used most often to describe this has been one with ten folks in a rowboat; the three at the front row just as hard as they possibly can to reach the destination. Two in the very back are working just as hard to sink the boat. In the middle, however, we still have five folks who may or may not be holding oars, but they’re certainly not breaking a sweat in their rowing efforts!

For more on this, you're welcome to reach out to us directly at admin@dove-development.net to get a 45 Day Trial Access to our COMPLETE Leading At The Next Level program or you can check out Wes's recently released book, What's KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!) that was a #1 Best Seller on Amazon!

Any way we slice it, recruiting great candidates to join our team comes with a price tag! When we’re forced to recruit constantly because the business is growing, it’s hard enough—especially in a world where those great candidates are hard to come by. But suppose our voluntary turnover is an issue, and we haven’t provided the best team members we did have with a solid reason to stay. In that case, we can expect those recruiting costs to turn into real profitability killers. While leadership involvement can significantly impact our recruiting process, there’s never a shortage of demands on a leader’s time, so we must be highly intentional about being involved where it can help the most.

Not so long ago, a friend who does high-end video production for a national healthcare system asked for my feedback on streamlining that organization’s orientation process. He told me that each executive team member had a direct role with all new employees. They had approached him about the potential of creating video orientation to replace what they were doing to free up some of that time. He explained that this would also ensure consistency in the message and provide coverage whenever one of those executives wasn’t available. I replied that it certainly would be possible and that both of the things he mentioned could be achieved. But then I shared the comparison of the two management teams I described before—and, more importantly, the feeling I still have about their different levels of involvement all these years later…

Here’s the thing: just showing up and rambling through a canned speech isn’t the secret sauce. The managers who never participated in the weekly orientation sessions I held with new employees from March 2013 until I moved on in October 2014 likely improved retention by NOT interacting with those team members right away! The impact the plant manager made on me in 1996 wasn’t simply because he popped in and talked to us; it was abundantly clear that he meant what he said, and he backed his words up with his actions for as long as I knew him.

I emphasized to my friend that how and when the executives he was working with interacted with their new team members was far less critical than it was for them to be completely genuine in every interaction they had with their teams—and that would never just happen! They need to be very proactive in their approach. While doing that seems far too rare in organizations today, I’m convinced it’s not complicated. I also don’t believe that the majority of executives and owners who aren’t involved in the recruiting process have ill will toward their teams; I think it’s usually a matter of being pulled in all directions, and initiating involvement in the recruiting process or engagement with the folks at all levels of their organization isn’t necessarily the fire that seems to demand their attention the most.

For more on this, you're welcome to reach out to us directly at admin@dove-development.net to get a 45 Day Trial Access to our COMPLETE Leading At The Next Level program or you can check out Wes's recently released book, What's KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!) that was a #1 Best Seller on Amazon!

Earlier, I mentioned starting a job on March 12, 1996, that I thought would get me through college and how much that organization invested into hiring forty of the one thousand or so candidates who applied. I didn’t share how much of that investment came during the first two weeks we were on the payroll. The company certainly had a lot of time and money tied up in the process before we ever set foot on the property: several rounds of off-site interviews, competency testing at the local tech school, background checks, and drug screens—which shouldn’t be confused with “drug testing” because testing drugs was a bit more taboo back then. That all carried a hefty price tag, even back in the ’90s, but not nearly as much as the organization invested by having all forty of us go through two full weeks of orientation!

At that point, the starting wage for hourly positions at that facility was $9.48 per hour before factoring in any of the benefits—some of the best in the Shenandoah Valley at the time. They paid each of us almost $1,000 to sit in training rooms for two solid weeks, some of which covered the processes and procedures we’d soon be expected to follow to the letter. Still, there was just as much face time with the local management team.

I won’t pretend like I remember the majority of the material that was shared over the course of those two weeks. My point here isn’t to make a case for whether or not that much time was necessary. But I do remember like it was yesterday the impression the plant manager made with us from day one and how he walked the talk for the next few years until he retired. What stood out the most to me was his focus on the importance of safety, his making sure we knew he was always approachable, and his emphasis on paying little attention to the rumor mill. Regarding rumors, he assured us we’d hear at least one every day and said we should start one of our own if we didn’t!

While joking about us starting rumors, he was incredibly serious about safety and how approachable he was. I saw him on the shop floor interacting with the off-shift crew I was part of more in my first month than I had seen the construction foreman at the job I came from in the entire year I worked there—and that foreman was only responsible for the six or eight of us on that one crew.

Fast-forward to late 2013 and most of 2014. I was doing almost all the hiring for that facility I started with in March of 1996. At that point, the amount of time we were given to complete all the new hire paperwork, cover all the rules and regs, and introduce the new employees to our safety and quality processes was limited to just four hours. Those new team members spent the rest of their first day engaged in something similar to what they were hired for. I’m still not making a case for whether the time for the orientation process was good or bad. Still, I will challenge you to consider which version of orientation in that same facility provided the new folks coming on board with more exposure to the local leadership team. Since I’m too impatient to give you much time to guess, I’ll lay it out for you! During my final eighteen months with the company, when I hired around 225 people, I don’t remember a single instance where the plant manager even said hello to one group of new employees. To that end, the only managers who were regularly involved in the orientation process were the safety manager and the quality manager, both of whom I consider close friends still today—which is likely tied to the fact that they gave a crap about the people we were bringing into the organization…

Here’s one more question: If you worked in that facility under both of those management teams, which would you be more likely to recommend to your friends or family as a place to consider when they were looking for employment?

For more on this, you're welcome to reach out to us directly at admin@dove-development.net to get a 45 Day Trial Access to our COMPLETE Leading At The Next Level program or you can check out Wes's recently released book, What's KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!) that was a #1 Best Seller on Amazon!