Certain types of comments overhead throughout a company are red-light indicators that the organization has an employee engagement issue. Have you heard any of these recently at your workplace?
From senior executives:
- Nobody seems to understand where we’re going or why.
- This merger <or change effort, acquisition, buy-out, restructuring, etc.> is not going well.
- My people just don’t get it.
- I sent out the memo and still nothing has changed.
- Employees just don’t seem to care.
- The old ways are not working anymore.
- We keep losing our best people.
- I’m new to this position and have lots of ideas to make things better.
From functional managers:
- My boss keeps pushing me to improve my team’s performance.
- We’re not integrating this new technology.
- It’s really hard to recruit top talent.
- Overtime is taking us way over budget.
- Nothing gets done.
- Morale is really bad.
From employees:
- There are so many rumors, and no one knows what’s really going on.
- This used to be a great place to work.
- This was once a great company (or division/team).
- Why are we doing this?
- What’s in this for me?
- I’m sick and tired of all the changes.
- Management doesn’t walk the talk.
- Work-life balance — what a joke!
- Who can I trust?
