Practical leadership actions to re-engage employees, strengthen motivation, and improve team performance.

A lot has been written about The Great Detachment and in the past year I have frequently been asked what employee detachment is, how it fits in with employee engagement, and how to overcome it. So let's try and get some clarity on this.

Here is a short summary of the in-depth article :

Summary

What is Employee Detachment? - Employee detachment is where employees are physically present but mentally and emotionally disconnected from their work. This results in reduced productivity, increased turnover, and wider impacts on customer satisfaction and service delivery.

How big is the Problem? - Gallup's research shows that only 30% of employees are "engaged", or giving their best, meaning 70% are detached to some extent. This detachment significantly affects business performance, potentially costing the global economy $7.8 trillion.

Two Key Different Types of Detachment

• "Not Engaged" Employees: These individuals are indifferent but may occasionally perform well.
• "Disengaged" Employees: These individuals are actively avoiding giving their best effort. Their negative influence requires four engaged employees to offset their impact.

With 10% of employees typically "disengaged," companies need at least 40% engagement to counterbalance their effect.

Causes of Employee Detachment - The root cause of detachment is ineffective leadership, which manifests in several ways:

1. Over Task-Focused Leadership: Managers overwhelmed by tasks often fail to engage with employees positively.
2. Workload Imbalance: Leaders unable to manage team workloads create stress, poor work-life balance, and disengagement.
3. Lack of Recognition: Employees who don't receive positive feedback tend to detach emotionally.
4. Limited Career Development: Without growth opportunities, employees see no future and disengage.
5. Negative Culture: A combination of the above factors will create an negative work environment.
6. Remote Work Challenges: While remote work suits many, about 20% of employees are prone to social isolation, making proactive support crucial.

Solutions to Overcome Detachment - Addressing symptoms like workload imbalance or lack of recognition alone won’t solve the problem. The fundamental issue is average leadership, just good enough to get by. Strengthening leadership to good across all levels is the solution.

Accelerate Your Success System - My proven three-step system was designed to address detachment and disengagement by:

1. Building Strong Leadership Skills: Ensuring foundational leadership abilities are in place.
2. Enabling Leaders to Bring Out the Best in Teams: where employees are supported, recognised, and motivated.
3. Focusing Employee Efforts on Organisational Success: Aligning employees' best efforts with key business objectives.

Good Core Leadership Skills Development - This is the only way to minimise employee detachment. Many businesses don't deliver leadership training to the depth required, assuming they already have effective leaders. Studies suggest 80% of leaders have never been properly trained in critical skills such as delegation. This skill gap directly causes detachment and disengagement.

For example, training leaders in the basics of effective delegation takes less than 10 minutes and has shown to save most managers several hours each week, time they can redirect toward engaging their teams.

Targeting the "Not Engaged" Group - While improving leadership benefits all employees, targeting the "not engaged" group offers a key opportunity. Within this group, 10-20% are very close to being engaged. By enhancing leadership skills, this group can shift quickly into being engaged, raising overall engagement to 40% or more, which then helps negate the impact of disengaged employees.

Conclusion - To minimise employee detachment, organisations must ensure strong leadership skills to the depth required are in place. This is the most effective way to improve engagement and optimise performance. By focusing on leadership development, organisations will build a motivated and inspired workforce, which drives productivity, and achieves long-term success.

Full In-Depth Article

What is employee detachment ?

Detachment is effectively employee disengagement in a general sense, where employees may be present in the workplace but are not mentally and emotionally focused on their work, and so not giving their best.

This is a fundamental risk to the success of any organisation and employers need to address it. It can lead to many real issues, from employee productivity concerns to increased turnover numbers which can reach record-high turnover in a cooling job market with wider impacts on areas such as delivery of services, customer satisfaction, and even implementation of AI.

The use of the single term “detachment” is, in itself, a risk because it fails to adequately help leaders and companies really understand what is going on beneath the surface in their workforce and how to take the most effective steps to deal with it.

No matter what you call it, employee detachment or disengagement, it needs to be addressed. However the biggest problem is that detachment is not visible and distinguishing between individuals who are detached and those who are not is not easy. And if you cannot easily identify those who are detached how can you solve the problem ?

How big is the employee detachment problem ?

Detachment is a significant problem in every workplace, across industries and countries and we need to make changes to beat it. Detachment is essentially not being engaged at work. If you take the significant Gallup research data, and that which others produce on engagement, even taking an optimistic perspective potentially only 30% of employees in a majority of organisations are engaged - giving their best. Having 70% of your employees not giving their best should be something which gives leaders and, in particular C-Suite, nightmares. However resolving this often doesn't feature as one of their key priorities.

Gallup defines “actively disengaged” employees as those who are “emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive.” And that inevitably has an impact on products, services and customers.

Gallup's latest research, and other studies, have also shown significant impacts both economically and in terms of wider society, potentially a loss of $7.8 trillion revenue globally which is approximately 11% of global GDP.

Employee Detachment – what you aren’t told but need to know

It's really important that you understand what is happening today beneath the surface, and that's much more than the vast majority of articles on detachment tell you. It's only when you understand this will you be able to identify specific opportunities and actions to solve the problem.

To keep it simple think of employees who are "engaged" as not being detached. Most articles on detachment consider the “detached” to be one single group, they aren't. The employee engagement perspective digs deeper to enable better understanding.

From this employee engagement perspective those who are not "engaged", so detached, actually fall into two groups the “not engaged” and the “disengaged”. As an average in most organisations if you have 70% of employees who aren't “engaged” then within this group maybe 55 to 60% of total employees will be “not engaged” and 10 to 15% “disengaged”. This is a critical distinction.

You could summarise it as that the “not engaged” are just not bothered but will occasionally give their best and that the “disengaged” are proactively not giving their best. This is important to know. The two groups need different approaches.

It is often possible to move the “not engaged” to become “engaged” – to give their best - it is much more difficult to get the “disengaged” to become “engaged”. But the impact of the “disengaged” must not be underestimated. Studies show that for every one “disengaged” employee you need 4 “engaged” employees to counteract the negative impact that they have on the team.

If you work out the maths that means that if you have only 10% “disengaged” you must have at least 40% “engaged” to mitigate their impact. That is why having maximum employee engagement is important because statistically, at any time, you will inevitably have a few disengaged people.

On the positive side if you are a new employer to someone you will have a honeymoon period of a few weeks to engage them proactively

Employee detachment - Causes

It's interesting that many of the drivers of employee detachment are the same as caused The Great Resignation. That reset expectations amongst workers about their work environment, in general terms to expect more from leaders. Many articles on employee detachment list a number of perceived causes.The reality is that these are symptoms not the underlying problem.

The fundamental cause of employee detachment / lack of engagement is ineffective leadership which impacts employee experience. What leaders do day to day, or don’t do, is the main cause of detachment. This then manifests itself in a number of areas which are seen as causes but are just visible symptoms. Obvious examples are :

Too much task focus – leaders unable to spend time to focus on people

This is the classic “too much work” and “not enough time” problem where managers are totally focused on the delivery of the task and so fall into the trap of not keeping time to interact positively with people - to set clear expectations, to engage in two-way communication, to inspire, support and develop their people. This creates an environment where employees have little confidence in their leaders. But this focus on task can also manifest itself in micro management which also has a negative impact.

Too much work not enough time – team members

This is not just a problem for leaders but it is also a problem for employees where their team leader is unable to effectively manage team workloads. That also leads to negative effects around work-life balance, employee satisfaction, and meeting employee expectations.

This is not just about the ability of the leader to manage the workloads which the team currently has but also to ensure that the team is not overloaded. This one of the greatest challenges which leaders have. They find it difficult to say "no" when they are asked by their boss to take on more work for the team.

“Too much work” and “not enough time” inevitably leads to cognitive overload. At a low level this will lead to detachment and disengagement but as it builds up can potentially lead to burnout and associated mental health issues. Research published in Work & Stress (2023) found that employees experiencing high levels of job stress, coupled with low autonomy, reported higher levels of disengagement and detachment from their work.

Lack of Recognition

Praise is something we as humans are hard wired to want and enjoy, its a fundamental part of job satisfaction. Employees who don’t feel they are recognised for their good work will disengage. This recognition in most cases is day to day positive feedback where due. But it also needs to be underpinned by good formal performance management practices.

Numerous studies have found employees who feel unappreciated in their roles are more likely to become emotionally detached.

Lack of Career Development

Again we as humans are hard wired to want to grow and develop so if employees see no clear career path or do not have at least one significant positive growth experience a year they are likely to become detached.

New work opportunities, especially for developing younger employees in new jobs are key to engagement. The 2023 Employee Engagement and Retention survey by Qualtrics found employees who do not see opportunities for long term progression are more likely to become disengaged.

Negative Culture

All of the previously mentioned problems when combined will create an overall feeling of a negative company culture, a significant driver of detachment / disengagement. When employees feel undervalued, disrespected, or overworked their belief in their boss and the organisation significantly decreases.

Just a few simple small steps within a structured process to improve culture will make a real difference. One good way to improve this is to think about how to grow employee pride in what they do and the organisation.

It's worth mentioning that younger workers, Gen Z in particular, are more susceptible to detachment due to higher expectations so may exhibit it at the highest rate. Whilst they have a lot of intrinsic motivation they need a clear purpose to apply it to and like social interactions around their work. If those aren't present they can become detached relatively quickly.

Remote work

There are also issues that need to be considered for those who are remote working. People like remote work flexibility and the ability to get more done when working on individual work remotely.

However there is group of about 20% of people who are susceptible to social isolation and need connection. The problem is leaders can’t tell who is in this group. Thus it is essential to ensure that all engaged in Hybrid work are supported when working remotely as much, if not more, than when in the office.

Overcoming Employee Detachment

To overcome employee detachment the obvious solution seems to be to address all the symptoms listed in the previous section. But is not the best approach. As was previously stated these are not the underlying problem, that is ineffective leadership.

The good news is the most simple and powerful solution to overcome employees detachment is to ensure that good leadership is present at all levels of the organisation. Even with limited resources it is possible to make a real difference quickly with the right approach. That was the objective in developing my Accelerate Your Success 3 step system.

The process is simple - Firm Foundation of Leadership Skills enable leaders to Get the Best from People, that minimises detachment and then allows you to Focus that Best onto what Delivers Organisational Success.

But too many organisations make the assumption that they have good leadership already, just because the organisation keeps running. This is a fatal mistake. Whilst things may seem to be going well because the leadership capability within their organisation is likely to be sub optimal employees will be detached. As a result, although not visible, the organisation is likely to be underperforming on its potential by up to 25%

In recent years numerous studies have shown that potentially 80% of leaders in most businesses have not been given the basic leadership skills they need to the depth they need to be effective in their roles. This is a staggering statistic that organisations seem to be proactively ignoring.

Here is the real world evidence. For the past 5 years when I have spoken to leaders around the world I have asked the question “how many of you have been taught how to delegate effectively at any point in your career”. The summarised feedback from nearly 100 events suggests that around 80% of leaders have never been taught how to delegate effectively. If you can't delegate effectively how can you be an effective leader ? If you can delegate effectively how can you deliver tasks optimally ? And this is just one specific critical leadership skill.

You are probably asking the question whether this makes any real difference. When I'm speaking after I get the audience answer I then run a 4 minute exercise on how to delegate more effectively. By the end of that exercise approximately 30% of the audience consistently finds two to four hours extra time per week, 30% four to six hours extra time, 25% six to eight hours, and 15% regularly find a staggering 8 + hours !

It's clear that vast amounts of time being wasted as a result of basic skills not being in place and this is also a cause of employee detachment. Think of a leader who has been in leadership roles for 20 years, how many half days a week there are in 20 years ? If they had been taught how to delegate from first appointment how much extra time they could have used to focus on engaging their teams to get the best out of their people and minimise detachment ?

Do I need to identify and target the detached ?

The people often ask the question how do I target the people who are detached ? If your leaders are effective then you don't need to. And working out who is detached is extremely difficult anyway. If leaders are effective it will impact on everybody, so everybody will be likely to give more effort, and in achieving that the detached will become engaged.

But it's also worth thinking about the different levels of detachment.

If we take the engagement figures of 30% being “engaged”, then there is your “not engaged” group of 55% and your “disengaged” of maybe 15%. Within the "not engaged" group are people who are only just “not engaged” on one end of the spectrum and on the other end people who are very close to being “disengaged”.

Here is an "easy win" - from experience there is a group of 10 to 20% within the “not engaged” who are only just in that group who, with very little effort, could be tipped into the “engaged” group.

However as has been said it is difficult to tell who is potentially in this specific subgroup. But what we do know is if the quality of leadership is improved by ensuring that all the key critical leadership skills are in place to the level needed this group will then move easily into the “engaged” group. Taking your total engaged to 40%+ to mitigate the impact of the "disengaged".

To beat detachment focus on boosting employee engagement

The best way both understand and overcome detachment is to focus in on employee engagement. If you understand it in more depth you will be able to identify actions you can take to maximise engagement to minimise detachment. For both leaders and organisations the one simple and powerful way to beat detachment, maximise employee engagement and optimise performance is to ensure critical leadership skills are in place in depth.To understand employee engagement more check out my video series on Youtube.