All over the news and blogs last week were reports about the latest Mercer What’s Working survey. Shock and alarm were expressed at statistics such as 32 percent of workers are seriously considering leaving their jobs, and 21 percent are not looking to leave, but are completely disengaged.
TLNT and The Wall Street Journal brought some sanity back to the discussion, reporting also that while this may be true, only 1.4 percent of employees have voluntarily left their jobs since April.
Taken together, I tend to believe that 21 percent figure of disengaged employees is actually higher. Combine that with those who want to leave, but can’t for whatever reason. As I’ve written before, that not insignificant percentage of employees are distracted by thoughts, daydreams or plans to leave your organization. They are not fully focused on the task at hand, nor fully engaged in helping you achieve your strategic objectives.
Asking “Would you leave your current job if you could?” is the wrong question.
Perhaps a better question would be: If currently employed, how much effort would you be willing to expend in looking for a new job?
What could we learn from that question? Three important takeaways:
Perhaps the best question would be to ask employees – Rank the following in order of importance to you:
What could HR pros learn from this question? Again, three important takeaways:
How would you answer the above two questions? What other questions do you think would get to the heart of employee dissatisfaction and disengagement more effectively?
This originally appeared on Derek Irvine’s Recognize This! blog.
