The Honeymoon Is Over--22 Million Workers Are Divorced From Their Jobs And Disengaged From Their Work
There is a nationwide concern about America’s “divorce rate,” but they’re not talking about matrimony. “The increasing number of American workers who are divorced from their jobs and completely disengaged from their work is shocking,” says Eva Jenkins of VIP Innovations. “More than that, it’s costing businesses a fortune in lost productivity and revenue.”
(PRWEB) September 13, 2006 -- Washington, DC -based training and consulting company VIP Innovations, announces plans to offer two new on-line training programs on the topics of “Retaining Winning Talent” and “Hiring Winning Talent.”
There is a nationwide concern about America’s “divorce rate,” but they’re not talking about matrimony. “The increasing number of American workers who are divorced from their jobs and completely disengaged from their work is shocking,” says Eva Jenkins of VIP Innovations. “More than that, it’s costing businesses a fortune in lost productivity and revenue.”
Dismissing charges that 21st Century workers are slackers or possess un-business like sense of entitlement, the blame squarely should be placed on the shoulders of ineffectual human resources management and managers. Disengaged employees aren’t born that way. They’re created by ineffective, badly trained managers and lack of strong human resource management within corporations.
Instead of matching the right employee to the right position for long-term success, most companies and H/R departments put the emphasis on simply filling the position as quickly as possible. As a result, American businesses are losing money as fast as they’re losing employees. Each staff turnover cuts into the bottom line.
Jenkins is not the only employment professional ringing the alarm bell. The statistics on workforce engagement are shocking. The Gallup Management Journal's semi-annual Employee Engagement Index reports that 54% of employees are not engaged, and 17% are actively disengaged at work and only 29% are actively engaged.
What does this mean to American businesses?
There are 22 million actively disengaged employees in America, according to another Gallup statistic. Their dissatisfaction is manifested in employee absence, illness, and a variety of other big and small problems that occur when people are unhappy at work.
Ultimately, disengaged employees can undermine a business and put it on the fast track to being out-of-business. It is therefore essential for managers and H/R professionals to refine their hiring process by expanding their methodology and using whole-person assessment tools.
The Peter Principle Lives on, Jenkins says two key features characterize a whole-person assessment. “A manager needs to look at whether the candidate is a good match for the job in terms of hard skills,” she explains. “But it’s also important to make sure that it’s a soft skills match, too…that the candidate’s interest and personal goals and needs will be met by the work itself and they will fit into the corporate culture.”
Unless a company defines success in a job, and in an organization, it cannot hire, retain or grow their workforce successfully. Rather than being terminated themselves, bad managers are continually being promoted. Soon they’re victims of the Peter Principle.
The Peter Principle is a theory put forth by Dr. Laurence J. Peter in 1969. It states that employees within a hierarchical organization advance to their highest level of competence; are then promoted to a level where they are incompetent, and then stay in that position because they no longer merit advancement.
The impact of employee disengagement is a bottom line issue. Gallup statistics show that unhappy workers cost the American business economy up to $350 billion annually in lost productivity!
“This is an urgent problem and businesses that don’t address their own role in the problem are doomed,” says Jenkins. The problem affects both companies and disengaged employees.
Many businesses fail to focus on employee development, training and retention at any level, including managers. “Companies don’t realize how important it is to give their managers the tools and training they need to do their jobs, too,” says Jenkins.
Since they haven’t received proper training, many managers themselves do not know what it takes to succeed in a particular role nor do they have an incentive to care. More often than not, the focus and emphasis of the H/R department is “putting out fires.”
For the average manager, the bulk of a workday is spent working with employees who are negative, completely disengaged and should be terminated because they shouldn’t have been hired in the first place.
In today’s aggressive business environment remaining competitive is “top of mind” for most executives. To remain competitive, you have to hire truly talented people and then you have to keep them. Turnover is not only costly in terms of replacement expense; it’s not productive, and it’s demoralizing to other team members when they see good people leaving the organization.
The program provides insight, skills, and tools that help team leaders to rate the attrition risk of each team member, surface individual team members’ retention needs, increase the level of commitment from each team member, and, most importantly, develop and implement a Retention Action Plan for the entire team.
VIP Innovations, a division of VIP Staffing, LLC, offers a variety of “high performance” management consulting, training and assessment programs. For information on VIP Innovations call (202) 973-0179 or visit the company’s website at www.vipinnovations.com.
###
Post Comment:
Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/TG92ZS1Db3VwLU1hZ24tWmV0YS1JbnNlLVplcm8=
Bookmark -
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Furl It |
Spurl |
RawSugar |
Simpy |
Shadows |
Blink It |
My Web
|
Share The News
Submit this press release easily to any of these major bookmarking and social media sites.