Employees have identified three traits guaranteed to kill enthusiasm.
Consider that the HR consulting firm Towers Perrin recently surveyed 90,000 employees to get a fix on their attitudes about work and whether or not they care about the job — or “are engaged,” in the parlance of the poll.
Here are some results:
- Only 21% said they truly care about their work and their employers enough to go above and beyond the minimum that’s expected.
- An astounding 38% said they had pretty much mentally checked out — they felt no connection with the company and were essentially putting in time to get a paycheck.
- The rest said they were somewhere in between the two extremes.
Now comes the analysis — why a lot of employees don’t care or are lukewarm at best. It comes down to three attitudes by managers that kill enthusiasm:
They don’t know what they don’t know. Maybe they don’t get out of their offices enough. But for whatever reason, it appears a lot of managers have no idea that their employees don’t care. Employees expect ostrichlike managers to get out and ask about the problems and the reasons for apathy.
They don’t care. A lot of employees feel certain their managers know about the problem, but don’t care. Why? Many managers don’t see the connection between employee satisfaction and revenue.
They don’t have power. Many employees believe that their managers get marching orders from above, and don’t question those orders. Swimming upstream is just too much work and hassle for those managers.