Unveiling Employee Disengagement: Factors Impacting Motivation and Productivity

P.S.: If you are in a hurry and you cannot read this article now, you can listen to the audio version of this article on your cell phone or while driving, by pressing here and choosing your favorite platform.

Advice from the author: do not skim through the article and read the headlines only. The headlines alone may be deceiving and will not show you the full picture.

It’s 10 a.m. and you have a meeting at the company that you are working at.

You enter the meeting room, and then you get hit by the demotivated faces of your colleagues.

5 minutes later, you look around you to see that some of your colleagues are already checking their phones; others are hidden behind their laptops, and some of them seem extremely bored and about to sleep.

After the meeting finishes, you walk outside the meeting room with one of your colleagues and have a side talk, where during this short discussion he explains to you how pessimistic he is about the future of the projects that you are working on.

He even says that he lost hope and stopped fighting to get things done on time because no matter what he does, nothing changes. On top of that, he explains to you that nobody seems to care, and the management does not seem to listen to their problems.

You start wondering ‘’we have the technology, manpower, budget, and people with great experiences. Why is the performance of our employees going down? Why do they look so disengaged? And why should we always fight in the last few days of the fiscal year to achieve the company's financial goals?’’

Do you want to know the reasons for these problems?

There is mainly one big reason, and there are 9 sub-reasons.

So let us start first with the main reason which is choosing the wrong unqualified people to fill managerial positions.

I know that you heard this many times before, but I want you to be patient with me for some more minutes.

I said it a thousand times, and I will keep saying it again and again. Choosing an employee to fill a managerial role because he or she is good at what he or she does is a big mistake.

Leading people is far bigger than that and requires a different skill set than the ones this employee used in his operational job.

But unfortunately, managers inside companies are usually chosen based on three criteria:

a- Their performance in their operational roles.

b- Their image and exposure to the upper management and how connected they are (and this is even more important as a selection criterion than the performance).

c- Politically. As an example, a company that wants to show that it supports gender equality can promote female employees to managerial positions not because they are qualified or the best fit, but because they have to choose females to improve the image of the company and to show that it is supporting gender equality and so on.

And please understand me right, this is just an example of how politics play a big role inside companies and what is happening in reality. From my side, I have nothing against female leaders or promoting qualified females to leading roles.

So, these are the 3 main selection criteria, and usually, nothing more is considered.

Decision makers rarely consider other more important factors while making this selection, such as:

- The influence and reach of this person. In other words, is he or she influencing the people around him positively or negatively?

- Trustworthiness & character. Which means do people trust, respect, and believe in this person and his or her way of thinking?

- Teamwork. Is this person a team player? or selfish and will focus only on his or her advancement no matter what the price is?

- And finally, communication skills and conflict handling. Is this candidate a good communicator? Can he or she build strong relationships with people within his or her team and outside the team or not?

Unfortunately, most of these factors are neglected.

And you can imagine the emotional impact on other employees when they find out that one of their colleagues who is known for being aggressive, disrespectful to others, angry all the time, or selfish, is being promoted to a higher job and will lead them.

Either they will search for another job to avoid this new boss, or they will get a direct message about what behaviors are being rewarded and promoted within the company, and they will lose any hope or dreams of making a career inside this company.

And here is an important statement. There is nothing more dangerous than a person living aimlessly without a specific goal or something to achieve. Because this person or employee will not only impact himself but will impact others around him.

Living without personal goals makes all things equal. If you did a lot of things today or if you did not do a lot of things, then it is the same. If you got a salary increase or your salary stayed the same, then there is no difference. If you finish things before the deadline or after the deadline, both are OK for you.

There is no goal, and with it, there is no motive. And if you are thinking that having a salary to have bread on the table is enough motive, then you are making things even worse. Because there is a huge difference between taking actions to thrive and taking actions to barely survive.

It is like attending an exam at school and your intention is just to pass versus when you go to the exam, and you want to get an A. Both are motives but one to thrive and one to survive. and you can easily estimate who will do more work, be more prepared, and put more effort into preparation for this exam.

With the motive to thrive in the exam, you will read the full book and do exercises once or twice while hoping that you didn’t miss anything, but with the intention just to survive, you will do the bare minimum. You will ask yourself ‘’Which parts of the book will most probably appear in the exam?’’ and you will only study these parts.

Now, do you remember when I told you five minutes ago that there is mainly one big reason, and there are 9 sub-reasons for employees’ low performance and disengagement?

After selecting the new manager, the way I explained above, companies and leaders follow this decision by making more crucial mistakes that lead to these other 9 sub-reasons.

1-Framing the wrong behaviors.

When the company employees see that the wrong person with the wrong attitude has been promoted, they get a silent indication that if they want to grow inside the company, they must follow this wrong behavior also. But this is only one side of the equation because the other side of the equation is related to this new manager’s choices.

Because guess who will he choose from his team members to reward or promote? The people who are like him in style, characteristics, and behavior.

To make it easier for you to visualize what I am speaking about here, imagine that the leader has a hard personality and a short temper, and he gets aggressive easily.

Do you think that he will choose and reward people from his team who are calm and trying to solve their problems by communicating calmly with others? 

I do not think so.

So, the first sub-reason is framing the wrong behaviors and making them more in demand.

2-Restraints from the Industrial Revolution era, or in other words, Time vs outcome.

In the industrial age, when hand tools were replaced by power-driven machines, if you work longer, then most probably this means more production.

But the problem is, we are not living in this industrial age anymore and our work and productivity now are not only depending on machines.

When the wrong person is promoted to a leadership role, he or she does not focus on productivity, results, and the well-being of his employees. Instead, he focuses mainly on the time they spend at their desks or appearing in front of him.

That’s why it is not surprising to find people in corporations, no matter where they are in the hierarchy, sitting and working until 7, 8, or even 9 p.m. And no matter how long they work, they are not even able to think about leaving early one day. And if they do, they feel guilty and as if they are doing something wrong or stealing.

Research confirmed that it is impossible for a human being to perform optimally if his life is not balanced in 4 specific areas: nutrition, physical activity, sleeping, and relationships with his or her loved ones.

And spending long hours at work consistently results in sacrifices in these 4 areas.

A personal story: Lots of years ago, I had a manager who was the first one to arrive in the office and the last one to leave. He used to arrive before 8 a.m. and leave at 8 or 9 p.m. almost every day.

One day, and it was Friday because I remember this story very well, he came to my office at around 2 p.m., holding his bag, and told me that he would have to leave early today because it was his son's birthday. But this was not the problem.

The problem was in how he said it. He said it as if he was stealing something or doing something illegal or immoral.

On top of that, he didn’t even need to mention a reason, he could have left directly or if he wanted to inform me, he could have said I am leaving and that’s all. The ironic thing is that aside from the huge number of extra hours that he was billing each day, the company policy was allowing anyone to leave starting at 2 p.m. on Friday. So theoretically, practically, and morally he didn’t do anything wrong.

But because he was working in a culture that favors time over productivity or progress, he felt as if he was doing something wrong and that he needed to verify in front of us what he was doing.

3- Lack of autonomy.

Daniel Pink wrote in his wonderful book ‘’Drive’’, that one of the factors that massively impacts motivation is autonomy.

And autonomy means self-government or in other words the ability to do the things that you want, at the time that you choose, with the people that you want to work with.

Wrong leaders love controlling others, and this results in a lack of autonomy and drives motivation downwards.

A personal story: one of the leaders that I work with told me that after the peak days of COVID, their company asked the employees to come back to their offices at least 3 days per week and to implement the hybrid model.

He then told me that now the employees in his team need to define 2 days per week when they will work from home, and they have to inform him and the Human resources department because they need to sign some documents.

I asked him ‘’And what if I am your employee and I want to switch any of these 2 days for any reason with any other days?’’

He told me ‘’then you have to get my approval in advance, and we have to update the documents and align with the human resources team.’’

I told him ‘’then your company and its decision-makers don’t understand what autonomy means.’’

And then I added ‘’You know, we have a famous proverb that says, ‘he messed up a great and tasty meal that he was cooking because he wanted to save 80 cents by not buying salt’, and this is exactly what your company did. It gave the employees partial autonomy by allowing them to work some days from home and then controlled this autonomy by adding a layer of bureaucracy and lack of flexibility’’.

4- Lack of a clear path.

OK, this one is a common responsibility between the employee and the manager.

Most employees ‘’think’’ that there is a career path defined for them in the company that they work for.

They keep waiting and waiting thinking that their boss knows exactly their future and what their next steps inside this company should be. Which is rarely the case.

Most companies and I did not say all, have no career path defined for their employees. Even though they should.

Each employee has the right to gain clarity and to understand clearly what his or her future may look like in 5 years if he or she maintains a specific performance or prerequisites inside the company.

For example, I know some big companies already, where the employee gets hired after graduation in something like a rotation program. 

And I do not mean job rotation, but I mean country rotation where the employee travels to another company location every 1-2 years and performs the same job there with the plan that he or she reaches a managerial position after 5 years maximum.

On the other hand, I urge each employee to think and create his career plan as well as a development plan. And you should, as an employee, test the progress of these plans against reality each year

And if you are not moving forward, then you must address this topic immediately and discuss it with your employer, and if you do not reach a clear outcome then I recommend that you leave.

5- Lack of automatic recognition.

Most employees have a false belief that if we do what we must do and keep silent, we will get recognized.

When I work with people, I usually hear some sentences that can be interpreted as ''My boss will come, pat my shoulder, and tell me you earned a salary increase without me even asking for it''. Unfortunately, this is not the case in most companies.

The reality is that if you do not highlight your achievements and market yourself, you will not get rewarded. If you do not ask for a salary increase, then you will rarely get it.

This is a wrong leadership attitude of course and a gap between what people need and expect, and what really happens.

This gap makes a lot of employees feel a lack of appreciation and leave, or their motivation and engagement levels drop, and their performance drops in silence, especially the employees who are not assertive enough to ask for what they deserve.

6-Focusing on the wrong KPIs in the company because winning covers mistakes.

Most Managers inside companies, especially inside big corporations, focus only on the target KPIs sent to them from the top management, and these target KPIs are mainly related to tangible activities that can either generate more revenue or decrease costs.

Yes, there are mid-year and end-of-year reviews, and the employees are supposed to deliver a development plan for themselves each year.

But, in reality, managers do not care that much if you achieved your yearly development plan or not. They care more about your performance and how this can be translated or contribute to the company's main KPIs, and not your development and growth plan.

That’s why, If the numbers related to these 2 target KPIs’ -revenue and expenses- are good and the company is winning, then everything is perfect. Which in reality is not.

Winning makes us overlook our mistakes or even underrate them, but in reality, focusing only on winning or focusing only on whether the target revenue is achieved or not as the main K.P.I. can be deceiving. Because Revenue was and will never be an indication of good leadership or good company culture.

While Profit, revenue, and costs are very important KPIs, other numbers such as Employee turnover rate within each team or department, or employee satisfaction and engagement rates are also very important.

(An advice: please do not measure the engagement or satisfaction rates only via the surveys and questionnaires. Surveys and questionnaires alone will mislead you)

7-Not enough space for creativity.

If a company chooses the wrong person to fill a leadership role, especially if this manager’s behavior is bad, then most employees will be worried about making mistakes.

Being creative requires that you break the rules. You will never follow a specific user guide, manual, or instructions and be creative.

Sure, you need instructions and user manuals to learn how to do something at the beginning. But after following instructions for a specific time, you should aim to be creative and to innovate and invent. And to innovate, you need to try new approaches and fail and to correct them and to fail again...etc. until you achieve something.

If the employees feel unsafe or insecure being supervised by this new manager, they will never try to take new risks and fail.

8-Employees feel that they are not heard.

Do you remember the story that I mentioned in the opener? the worst thing in any relationship is to feel that you are not heard or that your opinion is not valued.

Unfortunately, nowadays, this happens a lot, especially inside big companies. It's very normal nowadays to hear employees using words such as ‘’they’’ or ‘’them’’ when they are referring to the management.

This is a huge indication that the employees perceive the company atmosphere and culture as divided between them and the top management and that they are not all in the same boat.

9-Focusing more on promoting the company’s image outside than fixing the employees’ problems inside.

This one is very funny because I see it A LOT in this social media era. When I look at LinkedIn for example, I see lots of companies trying to promote their culture by taking pictures of their employees at events and showing them as having fun, or by taking a picture of a new employee’s desk with a new laptop and equipment on it...etc. and they are using hashtags to spread the word and show how life is amazing.

But to be honest, none of these things can truly prove that a company has a great internal culture.

Let me share with you a funny story.

One of my clients was working at a big company. She was feeling demotivated and depressed at her work, and she was having problems with her managers. She always complained that they neglected her, that they rarely listened to her opinion, and that she felt undervalued and disrespected.

During a specific working day, the company that she was working for announced a celebration at the company premises. This celebration started in the afternoon and until the end of the working day. There was food, drinks...etc. and on top of that, the employees were not forced to work in the afternoon because they could attend the celebration.

After the day of the event, she came and shared with me the story, so I told her ‘’Great. Tell me that you did not attend this celebration and that you stayed in your office to take a stand and to show that you disagree with the way that you are being treated.’’

She answered me and said, ‘’No, I attended of course.’’

I asked her ‘’why?’’

She told me ‘’A lot of the employees at the company are unhappy and disengaged, and they attended also.’’

I told her ‘’well if this is your attitude and the attitude of your colleagues, then how do you expect things to change inside the company if the management does not see or feel that anything is wrong? Why did you all attend the event?’’

And then she answered ‘’Well, free food and drinks, and on top of that I will not be obliged to continue the working day. So why shouldn’t I?’’

This answer summarizes a lot of what is happening inside corporations.

I want you to imagine with me, how many pictures were taken during this event and spread on the internet to show how life is wonderful at this company location and to promote it.

Taking happy pictures or showing your employees smiling over social media means nothing.

And for me, I would prefer that you direct your efforts to really improve your employees' lives and company culture rather than putting this effort to show me on social media that you are a cool company while a lot of the employees working there are not happy at all.

If I am an employee, then I am spending more than 33% of my day working at a company. And I do not want to feel pain each day and hate my life doing so.

This will not only impact my emotional state at work, but it will also impact my relationships with my family and friends outside of work and my general well-being.

These are all the consequences of choosing the wrong leaders.

Share with me your opinion in the comments section below and tell me if I forgot any other thing that you would love to mention, or if you believe there is something else that impacts employee engagement and fulfillment.

P.P.S.: Do not forget to subscribe to this NEW LinkedIn newsletter (if you are not subscribed) and to share this article if you found it helpful.

I work with leaders and teams as a Consultant and advisor...

1- To help leaders transform their teams and organizations and amplify their influence, all while living a balanced life.

2- Boost the performance, motivation, and engagement levels of teams (such as sales teams, marketing teams, engineering teams... etc.).

3- Improve cross-functional collaboration and redesign the workplace culture (especially in cases of restructures, and mergers and acquisitions).

If you need advice regarding any of these topics, send me a message or a direct email: mohamed@mohamedhanbal.com

Website: www.mohamedhanbal.com