by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations, Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Let’s face it. Routine work can be boring. Doing the same work for extended periods can affect an employee’s attitude toward their job, employer and life. There are things employers can do to alleviate the tedium of work they need performed, keeping the incumbent employee interested and engaged and the new-hire curious and open-minded.
Workers of all ages are showing frightening levels of decline in engagement with their work. According to a recent Gallup survey, “The New Challenge of Engaging Younger Workers:”
- “42% of employees who are looking to find a new job say they feel their company is not maximizing their skills and abilities.” (Deloitte)
- Among the reasons for quitting, career development is the most common for employees that leave within their first 90 days in a company. (Work Institute)
- According to LinkedIn research, “94% of workers say they would be more likely to stay at a company if it invested in their career.”
With the natural increase in retirements and the loss of technical expertise, losing workers unnecessarily seems to be risk no one would want to take.
These data points were reenforced by other measures viewing the employee attitudes from another angle. According to HR Dive, about 65% of employees said they suffered from burnout last year, according to a Dec. 18 report from isolved, a human resource management system. Employee burnout has decreased somewhat compared to 2022, according to the report, but it’s still heavily affecting productivity. About 72% of employees said burnout impacted their performance.”
Burnout has continued to rise across all age groups. Conversely, engagement has proportionately declined. While troubling if left unaddressed, actions can be taken reverse these trends.
One, long overdue, measure that employers can take is to reexamine internally the company’s approach to onboarding and training workers once hired. Is there a system in place to deliberately train workers for the tasks they are expected, and measured against, to perform? Or has the process slipped into an undefinable array of half-hearted measures? It seems obvious that if the first impression a new-employee gets is that the company really doesn’t care enough to properly train them yet is strangely overt in their critique of performance, an employee’s attitude might feel the impact. And if left to permeate the company’s culture, this could cultivate widespread feelings of:
- insecurity
- resentment
- anger
- disappointment
- helplessness
causing the employees to seek opportunities for personal growth and personal value enhancement elsewhere.
Once the company self-evaluation comes to the conclusion that deliberate worker development is better, start connecting the internal resources to construct a system of worker development; clearly definable and recognizable, equitable to all trainees and incumbents, and standardized with an outcome that incentivizes the employee to want to learn and management to support and commend each worker’s efforts to improve themselves in the learning and performance of the job.
A pathway to personal growth and the realization of goals along the way can go a long way to improving employee engagement and decreasing burnout. Most of all, it becomes a win for the employee and the company on many levels.
Check out Proactive Technologies’ structured on-the-job training system approach to see how it might work at your firm, your family of facilities or your region, to counter employee burnout and increase employee engagement while lowering the internal costs of training and turning it into a true investment with measurable returns. Contact a Proactive Technologies representative today to schedule a GoToMeeting videoconference briefing to your computer. This can be followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues. As always, onsite presentations are available as well.
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