12 Barriers That Adversely Influence Employee Engagement

Employees are a company’s most important assets. Good employees are the key drivers of a company’s business performance and profits. Companies must ensure they can retain them for as long as possible to achieve the best results.

Retaining employees is becoming increasingly challenging for all companies, due to the ever-changing needs and expectations of employees, which are fueled by several socio-economic factors.

Employee engagement targets prolong employee tenure in a company by providing a sense of purpose and value for employees' work. However, several conditions can adversely influence employee engagement.

Let’s look at how companies can identify the critical factors affecting employee engagement and leverage best practices to engage all employees.

What is Employee Engagement, and Why is it Important?

Employee engagement refers to the levels of involvement and enthusiasm shown by employees towards the company and its growth. Engagement encompasses how employees interact with their colleagues, participate in company initiatives, and their overall satisfaction with company policies, among other factors.

Each employee can exhibit different levels of engagement. Differing levels of engagement necessitate that companies follow the 5 C’s of employee engagement to encompass a range of initiatives and strategies that engage all employees.

Let’s look back at a Gallup survey with the following results from organizations that took employee engagement seriously:

• 18% greater productivity
• 23% greater profitability
• 78% lower absenteeism
• 21% lower turnover in an otherwise high employee turnover organization

Clearly, employee engagement is a key driving factor in boosting the core metrics required to improve a company’s most important assets: its employees.

Understanding the Impact of Low Engagement in the Workplace

Employees who fail to regularly engage, communicate, or collaborate with their colleagues, leaders, and company management often find themselves a misfit in the workplace. Naturally, they tend to be less productive in achieving their work goals, which can eventually lead to turnover, job switching, or demotivating other employees.

Low engagement or disengagement among employees can impact a company’s business in more than one way:

1. Poor team dynamics: A lack of clear communication and active participation by even one team member in setting work goals and achieving team targets can tamper with the entire team’s work environment.
2. Increased turnover: Disengagement and a lack of motivation can gradually lead to an employee feeling like an “odd man out” at their workplace, ultimately leading to them quitting their job or switching to a better place.
3. Reduces business profits: Low engagement indicates low productivity among employees, directly affecting their ability to contribute to the company’s growth.
4. Disengagement as an epidemic: Even one neutral or negatively engaged employee can cause a group of employees to lose interest in working for the company. This negativity begins to spread among employees, creating rifts between them and management and ultimately lowering overall productivity and progress.

12 Conditions That Adversely Influence Employee Engagement

Leaders and HR professionals face a challenge in engaging employees. Employee retention and engagement are as complex as the hiring process, since retaining the best talent hired in a company is crucial.

Engagement is more complex since different employees have different needs that keep them engaged in their work. Similarly, employees can exhibit neutral engagement or disengagement due to several barriers that affect their engagement levels.

Here are some of the top conditions that adversely affect employee engagement levels in a company.

1. Poor Management or Leadership

Company management should constantly take the pulse of its employees and devise initiatives that address their concerns. Failing to do so can lead to poor management practices that can reduce employees' active engagement.

Leaders and managers must connect with their subordinates and team members through both online and offline channels to analyze employee concerns and discuss them effectively. They must be ready to swiftly develop action plans to address such concerns, provide appropriate compensation, or implement new initiatives.

An inability to meet employees’ expectations and address their concerns shows that the company’s management is becoming a barrier to its employee engagement.

2. Lack of Recognition and Appreciation

Employees engage with the company at the rate at which the company meets their needs and expectations. While everyone gets paid for their work, occasional tokens of appreciation and recognition at different levels boost an employee’s morale.

Appreciation and recognition of employees for their contributions to a team’s deliverables, a company’s performance improvement, and business growth give them a sense of pride and accomplishment, motivating them to engage and work better.

However, a lack of timely recognition can make employees feel their work is not valued by their superiors. As a result, they tend to be less productive and engage neutrally.

3. Inadequate Compensation and Benefits

Employees choose to work for a company for several reasons. One of the main reasons includes attractive compensation packages with direct and indirect employee benefits.

In fact, several people switch jobs because other companies provide better pay packages and benefits compared to their current company. For these reasons, companies must be aware of the latest prevailing compensation packages offered by their competitors for various job roles and develop similar packages for their existing employees.

Failing to provide the right compensation and employee benefits can lead to significant employee turnover. Companies that fail to periodically revise employee compensation packages often experience high turnover and the loss of top talent.

4. Limited Career Growth or Development Opportunities

The next crucial factor after recognition that causes employees to fluctuate in their engagement levels is their growth trajectory within the company. Staying stagnant in a job role for a long period can make employees feel the company does not provide them with scope for growth.

Additionally, a lack of upskilling and training opportunities can make employees feel apprehensive about their ability to face the job market. Naturally, they tend to dissociate themselves from their work tasks and engage less.

Companies that fail to help employees upskill themselves often see disengagement among their employees.

5. Poor Work-Life Balance

After the COVID-19 pandemic, more organizations have continued to offer flexible working and remote work options. These benefits have helped employees achieve a better work-life balance, especially when tending to immediate family members or having infants and children at home.

In fact, most employees nowadays prefer and switch to companies that provide flexible work options, irrespective of pay compensation. Such trends indicate that companies promoting a work culture with minimal personal time for employees are experiencing downward trends in employee engagement rates.

Ideally, companies should encourage employees to work productively during their designated work hours. This time can vary depending on the team’s work dynamics while providing employees with a sense of autonomy to work at their comfort. Employees who fail to meet work goals and struggle in their personal lives often demonstrate difficulty balancing their work and personal lives.

6. Absence of Transparent Communication

One critical reason for low employee engagement is the lack of proper communication between employees and leaders. Leaders and HR professionals must have several channels to communicate with the company’s employees to understand their satisfaction levels with their jobs.

Failing to connect with employees directly or through several levels of leaders and managers creates barriers between leaders and grassroots-level workers. Similarly, a lack of transparency within a team can cause fluctuations among the team members and leaders, directly impacting their work performance and deliverables.

Failing to adopt transparent communication initiatives can be a huge barrier that affects employee engagement.

7. Poor Company Culture

A company’s work culture is determined by how it treats its employees and the degree of freedom they are given. A good company trusts its employees and their ability to work the best for them.

Companies must be flexible in addressing employee concerns and providing them with the flexibility that helps them engage and work more effectively. Failing to trust employees and give them their rightful autonomy can adversely influence employee engagement.

For instance, companies that cite trust issues as reasons for discouraging employees from working from home have seen employees feeling disengaged and move to other companies where they have more autonomy and flexibility.

8. Mismatch Between Role and Skill Set

A key precursor to employee engagement is hiring the right employee for the right job role. Employees find themselves a good fit in the company when they secure meaningful roles that match their skills and expectations and offer enormous growth potential.

However, some hiring errors can lead to employees being assigned to the wrong job role or being tasked with something they are disinterested in doing. This dissatisfaction among employees at the very beginning of their job is like a small crack that keeps getting deeper, leading to complete disengagement.

When companies have a larger number of employees working in roles that are irrelevant to their areas of interest, skills profile, and experience, they see low levels of employee engagement and poor work performance.

9. Lack of Meaning or Purpose in Work

There can be cases where employees feel happy at the beginning of their job in a company and gradually lose interest. Disengagement in such cases happens when employees are moved to teams or projects that do not align with their work goals and working style.

Furthermore, employees who are not recognized for their work feel they have little or no purpose in their team and job role. Without sufficient opportunities to prove themselves and remain skilled, employees tend to show less engagement at work and move to better opportunities.

Companies that fail to create meaningful job roles that match an employee’s skill set and job expectations, while also helping them grow in their careers, can experience lower employee engagement.

10. No Feedback or One-Way Feedback Loops

Employee engagement works best when there is transparent communication between all employees and between employees and their leaders or management. A crucial point to add is that the communication must be two-way or at least include a feedback channel.

Any communication from management must include a way for employees to provide instant feedback, allowing management to understand how they can improve and implement decisions that suit different employees.

Similarly, any communication from employees must have prompt responses from managers or leaders to ensure that their voices are heard. A failure to facilitate proper two-way communication can lead to disengagement among employees who remain anxious that their opinions are being disregarded.

11. Feeling Disconnected from Organizational Decisions

Different employees prefer different ways of communicating and learning about company decisions. Therefore, companies must adopt different channels to ensure that their organizational decisions reach all employees.

For instance, some companies have a company-wide intranet with an internal broadcast channel to publish the latest updates and receive feedback. Some decisions may be communicated through team managers or group leaders to get direct feedback from all members.

Failing to implement all possible channels of communication for company decisions can lead to communication gaps with certain employees, resulting in their gradual disengagement.

12. Employees Feel Micromanaged

Companies that do not trust their employees often resort to strict monitoring and tracking measures, which can lead to employees losing autonomy at work. Furthermore, a sense of constant monitoring or tracking can make employees feel trapped, leading them to leave the company soon after.

Micromanagement at the team level often leads to conflicts among team members, ultimately affecting the entire team’s output. Similarly, constant attendance tracking, strict leave policies, and inflexible work hours can lead employees to consider switching to places that offer more freedom.

Some companies also engage whistleblowers, who can make employees feel anxious and uncomfortable. Such actions do more harm in the long run and lead to the company losing some of its best employees.

How to Identify and Overcome These Barriers

It takes significant effort to understand why a company is struggling to engage and retain employees. Exit interviews with leaving employees are a rich source of feedback on what went wrong for them to take such a step.

Similar feedback from hiring managers, team managers, and existing employees can help HR professionals decipher how to improve employee engagement.

The HR team can collaborate with company leaders to develop employee engagement initiatives that meet employee needs and expectations. Employee engagement does not incur huge costs to companies, and there are several inexpensive ways to promote employee engagement.

Additionally, companies can leverage the support of the best HRIS systems to track and monitor employee engagement initiatives. These tools can automate adaptive rewards programs, online learning portals, payroll and benefits management, and many other features to help employees engage better.

How Revaluate180 Helps Improve Employee Engagement

Companies must focus on employees’ well-being and productivity throughout the employee lifecycle to ensure active engagement. From hiring and onboarding the right talent to consistently engaging them during their tenure, companies must make the right effort to retain their best performers.

Revaluate180 offers bespoke solutions that help companies hire and retain top talent in the industry. Our data-driven model leverages advanced data analytics and AI to deliver valuable insights that align with your company’s engagement, hiring, and retention goals.

We are proficient in helping companies reduce unconscious bias and focus on increased productivity through each stage of the employee lifecycle. Our AI-powered insights help leaders and HR professionals make informed decisions in hiring, engaging, and maximizing the potential of their employees.

Our team-building and employee well-being programs have been receiving rave reviews for promoting workplace unity through a variety of virtual and onsite activities.

Final Thoughts

Reiterating our opening statement, employees are a company's most valuable resource, and the company must do its best to retain those who have contributed to its growth and success.

Active employee engagement is crucial for maintaining consistent productivity and employee retention within a company. However, some companies may face conditions that adversely affect employee engagement. We came across some common situations that lead to poor employee engagement.

Suppose companies fail to identify and remove their barriers to smooth employee engagement. In that case, they can soon face situations such as mass employee turnover, low productivity, poor business growth, and an overall negative work environment.

If your company is facing challenges in engaging employees or increasing their productivity, contact us to explore how we can help you reach your goals effectively.