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The Great Detachment: the causes, signs and solutions to employee disengagement

By 29th January 2025February 5th, 2025Blog, Customer & employee experience, Leadership coaching
Disengaged colleague sitting at desk

Is ‘The Great Detachment’ impacting your people and your organisation? Axiom’s Chris Carey looks at the symptoms associated with detachment and explains some proven solutions.

For decades Axiom has witnessed, first-hand, large groups of people that didn’t feel an integral and valued part of the organisation that employs them. That’s nothing new. What is new is the awareness of this problem, which now has a less than motivational label, ‘The Great Detachment’.

The good news is that we know what to do about it and have been successfully addressing the issues for years.

Connect better with your colleagues today >

What is the great detachment?

In and around the Covid era, leaders had to deal with ‘The Great Resignation’ as the workforce re-evaluated what was important to them, many moving on to pastures new.

Now, with the market for new roles becoming tighter, many have no option but to stay put. And a lot of these colleagues report no longer feeling ‘connected’ to the company that employs them. This has been coined ‘The great detachment’, as more and more colleagues report a lack of alignment with, and motivation to deliver, company goals.

Indeed, in a Gallup Survey undertaken in the US in November 2024, just 45% of respondents strongly agreed with the statement, ‘I know what is expected of me at work’.

Whilst that is a troubling statistic, the average since January 2007 has hardly been stellar, at c. 51%.

These stark facts have driven Axiom to create some innovative employee engagement programmes to positively impact those statistics.

What can cause disengagement in the workplace?

Research points to a number of triggers for the disappointing increase in disengagement. Some are recurring themes, others more recent phenomena. Here are the trends we are noticing:

  • Lack of connection with the organisational purpose: Colleagues perform at their best when they understand how the organisation that they work for impacts the planet – and how their daily work contributes to that in a meaningful way. Yet leaders in organisations repeatedly fail to bring their purpose to life with colleagues around the world, even when they see themselves as outstanding communicators!
  • The ever-increasing pace of change: Even if colleagues did once understand what was expected of them, recent changes like restructures, redundancies, globalisation, and new technologies may have made that knowledge obsolete. These changes can often leave colleagues confused and bewildered, sometimes even guilty survivors.
  • Burnout: Colleagues are increasingly reporting the strain of being asked to do more and more, with less and less time and resource being made available to them. And given the environment around them, they are often fearful of saying ‘No’ – which only serves to make matters worse. And research tells us that this situation appears to be more keenly felt by the newer generations entering the workplace.
  • Remote working: The rise in remote and hybrid roles often leaves colleagues feeling lonely. They may have no one to talk to about the challenges they face, perhaps as a consequence of the growing pains associated with these new working practices.
  • Out of date performance management systems: Some business processes, for example performance management systems, have simply not kept up with the pace of change. Even the routine of daily or weekly check ins or 1:1s, to see how things are going, have fallen off the radar in many instances.
  • Feeling trapped: With the job market tightening all around them, colleagues do not feel they have much of an alternative but to ‘plough on’ with the role they currently have. ‘Not really wanting to be here’ is hardly a recipe for a productive and fulfilling day at work and must be addressed.

The positive effect of getting engagement right in organisations

Against this background of doom and gloom there is light at the end of the tunnel, and a prize worth fighting for.

Recent research by Gallup in the 11th edition of its Q12® meta-analysis (from 2024) tells us:

  • Improving clarity of expectations from today’s levels to best-practice levels can lead to a 9% increase in profitability and an 11% improvement in work quality.
  • Improving the connection between employees’ jobs and the mission or purpose of their organisation can lead to a 32% reduction in turnover and a 15% improvement in productivity.

Research from that same organisation also shows that:

  • Highly engaged business units achieve a 10% difference in customer ratings and an 18% difference in sales.
  • The behaviours of highly engaged business units result in a 23% difference in profitability.

“There has never been a more important time for leaders to truly connect with and inspire their workforce, giving them hope for the future and clear steps to make it a concrete reality.”
Chris Carey
Founder and Managing Director, Axiom Communications

Chris Carey running employee engagement workshop

How can leaders help their teams re-engage?

We’ve learned a lot about minimising disengagement and maximising engagement over the years. Now we are ideally placed to help leaders apply some proven techniques, as elements of an integrated programme, to address the great detachment head on.

  • Building Psychological Safety and Trust: Creating solid foundations upon which to build is key. We often begin with workshops on psychological safety. Clients are then helped to routinely build psychologically safe practices into everyday interactions. This includes activities such as Teams meetings and 1:1s. The net effect is greater levels of meaningful and candid dialogue, leading to improved levels of understanding and trust.
  • Measuring and harnessing Employee Experience: Clearly demonstrating that you are listening to, and acting on, the lived experiences of your colleagues is another foundational step. So, benchmark where you are now, as your engagement programme gathers pace. And then measure it again at regular intervals to highlight what is going well and can be curated and celebrated. Equally you can go deeper than most employee opinion surveys ever could to explore what needs to be improved, and crowdsource recommended solutions along the way.
  • Co-creating the ‘North Star’ with colleagues: What better way to connect colleagues with the future direction of the business and build belonging, than involving representative groups of the workforce? These groups can help develop your ‘Collective Ambition’. Through a facilitated process, this can include co-creating the purpose of the organisation. It can also define the experience you want stakeholders, including colleagues, to enjoy and benefit from, and the role everyone will play in delivering success. The result? A clear direction of travel and pathways to get there.
  • Sharing the Big Picture: With your North Star now developed, it is time to bring your ‘Big Picture’ to life throughout your organisation, resetting expectations and reprioritising endeavours. Storytelling and visual metaphors are two of the most effective engagement techniques ever devised by man. When harnessed together, they form an innovative and memorable way to align entire workforces. This proven technique creates advocates and inspires everyone to take action.
  • Evolving recognition processes: In addition to updating your performance management processes, to be fit for today’s world, we advocate that you turn up the volume on your recognition activities. This could include the launch of competitions to celebrate teams and individuals who are delivering outstanding performances in delivering your strategy.
  • Reconnect with your people: We’ve long held the view that for colleagues to collaborate more effectively, first they need to connect as human beings. That means investing time in relationships with colleagues, listening to understand, taking an interest in them, being empathetic, and saying thank you – as well as focusing on the tasks that need to be delivered. An investment made here will often pay dividends long into the future.

Stopping the great detachment by greatly reconnecting with colleagues

The great detachment may be a relatively new term, but it is not a new topic, and it is certainly not great for your organisation. At Axiom, we’ve been working to minimise disengagement and its root causes for many years, instead, focusing on maximising engagement.

Perhaps our past experiences can help you create better futures for you and the teams you lead?

Book a no-obligation discovery call with one of our experts today!

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