How Much Does an Unhappy Employee Cost?

Susan Adams wrote a great article in Forbes about unhappiness in the workplace.  The title was Unhappy Employees Outnumber Happy Ones By Two To One Worldwide.  She goes over the results from a recent Gallup poll measuring employee job satisfaction.  It is astonishing the amount of lost productivity in the workforce due to employee dissatisfaction!

I wanted to focus on another problem related to employee unhappiness – the loss of experienced and seasoned workers.  These are people who have been in the industry for a long time.  They are career veterans.  They have earned their stripes and developed their processes throughout the years – often on the dime of the business owner.  They still have plenty to offer to their field and to those with less experience around them.  The tragedy is that they often disengage due to poor management practices.

It may require a paradigm shift in management to change this trend.  Young managers need to be encouraged to respect age and experience.  We have gone through a period where middle aged managers have taken over our institutions.  Like teenagers, they knew better than their elders.  The men of experience abdicated control to them.  Many seasoned veterans have been more than happy to take early retirement and golden handshakes.  They fill our golf courses and retirement communities and their respective industries have lost hard earned and valuable insight and experience.

As if this loss wasn’t great enough, many managers fail to equate this loss to the bottom line.  The dollar value associated with the disengaged/retired experienced employee is found in the unrealized productivity of the employee while he was gaining his experience and the unrealized productivity once he disengages.  In other words, the employer ‘pays’ for the employee to develop his craft in anticipation of future productivity gains.  He loses this ‘investment’ when the employee disengages or separates from the company.  Good managers know how to leverage the experience of their employees to increase the value of their product or service.

Ferdinand Fournies, in his book Why Employees Don’t Do What They Are Supposed To Do, concludes that “almost all of the reasons for nonperformance were controlled by the manager.  In other words, employee non-performance occurs because of poor management.” 

Adams lists the 12 statements Gallup used to measure employee engagement and proposes the following fix for employee disengagement: “The most obvious fix for unhappy workers goes back to the 12 questions. Communicate with your workers, telling them what you expect of them, praise them when they do well, encourage them to move forward. Give them the tools they need and the opportunity to feel challenged.”