Watch Out for Those Zombie Employees!

Every year the Gallup Organization does an employee engagement survey. The 2013 Engagement Survey produced its usual morbid results. According to the survey, only 30% of employees are “actively engaged” (care about doing a great job every day). (This number has been 29% +/- 1% for over 10 years!) Another 52% are “not engaged.” These employees (zombies) put in their time, and little more. The remaining 12% are “actively disengaged” (saboteurs), purposely trying to work poorly, sabotage, cheat time, etc.). In many cases managers bear the responsibility for these saboteurs either because they hired the wrong people or they failed to provide effective leadership. However, assuming that management did not cause the problem, what can you do to improve the situation?

The Actively Engaged – Learn what makes them love your company and their job! Thank them and let them know you love them (so you can keep them!) Find out how you can hire them at twice the rate. Leverage their enthusiasm to motivate the Zombies.
The Zombies – Give them something to be excited about. Provide them with a sense of meaning in their daily work. Offer additional financial incentives. Manage and coach them actively so they have no choice but to perform. You can also go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention web site on how to manage Zombies (http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombies.htm). 🙂
The Saboteurs – If they walked off the job would you be upset—or relieved? In the latter case, make sure you have checks and balances to get them off your bus now! Don’t hesitate to fire these people. The longer you keep them, the greater the risk they pose.

Finally, ask yourself what is motivating or demotivating about your company. Step back and become a keen observer of your own reality. Evaluate your corporate culture (see Patrick Lencioni’s book “The Advantage.”) and make sure it’s healthy.

With average corporate culture, we will get our average number of actively engaged, zombies, and saboteurs.  We will be average, not top-performing, in our market. The biggest difference between top performing organizations and the average is rarely something like unique products or services, but much more often 1) how well we attract more than our fair share of the actively engaged, 2) how well we motivate the zombies to become engaged, and 3) how quickly we identify and eliminate the saboteurs.

How are you doing in these 3 areas?  How do you know?