A disengaged employee is one whose sense of purpose at work has vanished and is no longer striving to meet the latest challenges. While they’re still completing their core duties and picking up a paycheck, staff who’ve lost their drive are no longer fulfilling their potential and helping to drive business growth.
In fact, a study that took a deeper look into the cost of disengaged employees to businesses found that they have 37% higher absenteeism, 18% lower productivity and 15% reduced profitability compared to colleagues. This equates to complacent staff costing businesses 34% of their annual salary.
Tackling the issue requires a new approach to performance management and many HR teams are turning to continuous feedback. In an environment where only 2% of companies globally have faith in their review practices, finding alternatives is key to ensuring organizations’ biggest assets are performing at their best.
The continuous feedback strategy should be implemented by HR but involve managers, employees and colleagues in analyzing performance. It can be run alongside annual or mid-year reviews and can even streamline this process, as information is being constantly collected through ongoing feedback.
Open communication is at the heart of the approach and continuous feedback strategies rely on three main components: goal setting, constructive feedback and everyday praise. While informal elements work well as part of this type of program, there must also be a formalized plan to ensure its success in the long term.
One way to harness the power of continuous feedback and translate it into actionable insights is through technology. A variety of tools have been produced to collect feedback from disparate sources and organize this data into visualizations, reports and benchmarks that can be accessed across devices.
Without such methods, it’s possible for companies to be overwhelmed by the amount of information they collect. It needs to be fed into a continuous feedback loop, which can be transformed into improvements that build upon each other over time.
Two metrics that are particularly useful to identify are ‘continue insights’ and ‘consider insights’. The first represents areas where the employee is being impactful and effective, whereas the second shows behaviors that could improve the individual’s impact going forward. Both need to be considered in tandem for a real-time view of performance.