Karina Young
Employee disengagement is a costly business problem that deserves the attention of every leadership team. The total global economic cost of disengaged employees exceeds $8.8 trillion annually, according to Gallup. The same group cited employee engagement hitting an 11-year low in 2024.
Organizations with highly engaged employees outperform their competitors by every key measure, including customer loyalty, market share and profitability. But too often, disengagement in an organization begins to feel like an intractable problem that’s nearly impossible even to understand, let alone do anything about.
I’ve been there. It’s frustrating. And it doesn’t need to be this way.
Fixing employee engagement starts with a better diagnosis
While businesses collectively spend billions to address disengagement, they often struggle to identify the most actionable causes and pinpoint ways to improve it. It’s an expensive guessing game that yields little progress.
Anyone can generate a measure of engagement. But diagnosing specific problem areas with pinpoint accuracy finally creates a shared understanding of what’s working, what’s not and where to focus. In the diagnosis phase, leaders should identify the one or two most impactful, actionable drivers of disengagement among the most critical employee segments so they can take the right action in the right places. It’s also critical to draw the through-line from disengaged employees to business risk.
As a company, we’re committed to increasing customer retention by 15% next year. But disengagement among high performers on our Customer Experience team has doubled over the last two quarters, driven largely by a lack of role clarity. We’re counting on this team to help us improve customer loyalty.
We believe we need to achieve at least a 25% improvement in engagement among this critical employee cohort by Q2 to help this team perform and retain our best people.
With a precise diagnosis directly connected to a key business priority, HR teams can confidently transition into the next phase of increasing engagement with confidence: planning.
Poised to plan
HR teams need a way to implement strategic action plans that are clear, accountable and trackable. Action plans grounded in the science of engagement help empower leaders and managers—and hold them accountable for their role in improving engagement, performance and retention on their teams.
Here’s the key: While HR is the team that brings together data and insights that inform a plan, it takes a commitment from the entire organization to succeed. The C-suite needs to provide the budget and resources to execute the plan and create accountability across the business. That’s why it’s so critical to begin with a strong diagnosis that links disengagement challenges to business challenges.
Cue action
It’s not enough for leaders to cross our fingers and hope managers get on board. We need them to act and inspiring them to do so requires accountability and empowerment. This can be done by investing in dynamic manager enablement, including coaching, training and tools that feel relevant and make them more effective leaders within their flow of work.
AI continues to emerge as a powerful force for manager effectiveness. AI-powered manager assistants can provide real-time, proactive recommendations on steps managers should take to support their direct reports better. For example, an AI assistant might trigger a suggestion to conduct a 1-1 with a team member with high turnover risk, outlining specific areas to focus on based on feedback from that employee.
This is how HR can transform people managers into change agents and culture builders.
Strategic action in practice
Forward-thinking HR leaders are embracing this approach, and their businesses and employees are reaping the benefits.
Jamy Conrad is vice president of people and HR at TrustRadius, the well-regarded buyer intelligence platform. When she joined the company, employee turnover was at a painful 40%. She set out to diagnose the culprit: a large cohort of new managers without proper training.
She then built a strategic plan to empower these developing managers to lead their teams more effectively. Her plan included getting managers to commit to weekly 1:1s with their employees and establishing short, asynchronous check-ins between manager and employee. This created better goal alignment, more regular feedback and surfaced early indicators of disengagement before it spiraled out of control. She also implemented new metrics to track gains in manager effectiveness, a leading indicator and catalyst for engagement, performance and retention.
Employee engagement is a critical driver of productivity, retention and business success. Letting it slip comes at a cost. Here’s to getting it right.
Source: HR Executive