Shelby Klingerman, Content Curator|

Andrew Sherman, a lawyer from Seyfarth Shaw LLP, recently spoke about disengagement in a presentation at Oracle HCM World and how it affects businesses’ innovation and growth. No company is immune to the growing problem of disengagement in the workforce.

Some key takeaways from Andrew’s presentation include:

• Most businesses reported disengagement as one of their biggest challenges.
• Disengagement occurs at every age, in every gender, race, demographic, etc.
• Training and mentoring employees is worth the risk of potentially losing them if it means they are more engaged while at your company.

Nowadays, people want to get paid more and work less. They are driven by money and are always looking to make more, but they are also so often distracted at work by outside factors that it leads to high rates of disengagement in the workplace.

Several surveys were addressed in the presentation, and the results showed:

• Employee engagement was ranked as a priority by 85 percent of executives.
• Only four percent of executives believe they are good at engaging their workforces.
• Engagement was ranked as the second largest challenge among companies. It fell only one percent behind employee retention.

One recurring theme that surfaces when discussing the challenge of disengagement is that many are quick to blame it all on “unmotivated, distracted” millennials. However, disengagement is not only an issue in one age group, gender, race, demographic, etc.

This growing amount of disengagement across the board can lead to problems with customer satisfaction, profitability, productivity, safety issues, theft and more. It negatively impacts key components of a company like the leadership, results and culture. These problems set a company up for potential failure.

To counteract these problems, companies need to actively work to engage their employees. Continually training and mentoring employees is a great way to start. Unfortunately, many companies hesitate to do so out of fear of losing the employees to a competitor.

Andrew makes the case that investing in your employees is worth the risk. If you create an environment that they can thrive in, your employees won’t want to leave!

To learn more about the disengagement dilemma and results in today’s workforce, check out the full presentation here.

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