The Risks of Employee Disengagement

What are the impacts of a disengaged employee?

For many years, I have championed the need to value engagement with travellers, travel and security management teams, their counterparts in HR and senior leadership … not to forget the rest of the organisation. Now this means so many things throughout everyone's time at an organisation, but in context to risk, a lack of engagement brings significant impact. Engagement is essential for ensuring safety, security and smooth travel experiences. When individuals are uncertain about their situation, what their next steps are, or unaware of where to seek assistance, it creates a sense of confusion and vulnerability … not a situation you or your workforce want to be in. This is where both your interpersonal skills and technology come into play.

So what questions does this raise?

• What really is engagement?

• When does disengagement impact the business?

• How do you actually measure/gauge engagement?

Gauging and Measuring

In a recent Gallup report 'The State of the Global Workplace', the report dives deep into what engagement means and what may be causing these shifts. The report suggests that engagement within many organisations has been hovering around 20%-ish for several years, which is a scary statistic, even if you think that sounds too low. If your employees and their wellbeing are not being addressed, every attempt to rebuild this relationship and trust you have with them is handicapped. With large organisations, this can be a steep task, but you can use technology to help inform, notify and engage at the most critical times. This is more the case where the risk solution you have deployed is able to personalise and contextualise based off your work and travel needs. It does require that any policy you need to put in place, needs some way to test and measure the level of engagement, otherwise is your policy really implemented?

So …

• Find a way to get an idea of what engagement looks like and how to measure it

• Do this often enough so you can track general engagement and spot where improvements can be made

• Implement policy so it can be tested and measured

Wider engagement

Engagement covers so many topics, whether it is more at a personnel level where managers and teams are failing to click and/or align, or whether it is the general buy in employees have with their organisation and objectives, which in turn affects their productivity. Change can come from many angles, such as the more recent effects Covid has had on workplaces, economic and political volatility, the changing demands from the organisation etc. If you are viewing this purely from the point of risk, a disengaged workforce can impact your business operations, general safety and security, sentiments around career prospects and recruitment, reputation and so on. Just throwing policy at people with generic content, mobile apps and generalised advisories is not always the answer if you are not willing to earn empathy and gain their trust.

So …

• Work closely with your HR team to ensure safety and security are materials are available for managers and their teams

• Identify the threats to your organisation and how that affects the individuals, their managers and what motivates their engagement

• Review how you share risk content within your organisation, just throwing it out there does not guarantee it will be read or absorbed

In Travel Risk

Now let's turn our attention to this from a travel risk. When you have a low level of engagement within your organisation, do you expect everyone to care about your travel policies around safety and security? Will they bother to read your communications on current policy and new policy changes? Your travellers need to feel confident that their trip has purpose, threats have been identified and mitigated and that your organisation has their back if or when incidents occur. When you approach individuals prior to travel with advisory or training materials, are they really understanding and absorbing them? When you notify them of an incident they may not be aware of, do they even notice the alert and realise it is something they need to act upon?

So …

• Find the best situations and times to push or share risk information with travellers

• Work with technologies and partners to produce compelling, concise and focused content at the right time and on the right device

• Review ways to make risk content more personalised to grab people's attention and encourages action

In summary

Engagement is hard to measure. In context to travel risk, how can you measure it without running exercises to gauge how people react and perform under particular conditions? The balance between duty of care and individual responsibility needs to be met for a successful safety and security program. Whatever policy you have put in place, make sure you get buy in from the management hierarchy, can test it with employees and be able to see how effective it has been ... and feed any improvements back into your policies and technologies implementing them.