Employee Frustration and the Cost to Business

For as long as I can remember, a conversation has been going on about the cost of frustrated employees to a business. There are a few terms that are used; dis-engaged, absenteeism, presenteeism – but it amounts to the same thing – frustration has a real cost, and you may be surprised just how high that is.

  • 51% of the U.S. workforce is not engaged (Gallup)
  • Disengaged employees cost organizations between $450 and $550 billion annually (The Engagement Institute)
  • Disengaged workers cause massive losses in productivity – between $450 and $500 billion a year (Mental Health America)
  • It can cost 33% of an employee’s salary to replace him/her (HR Dive)
  • 75% of the causes of employee turnover are preventable (HR Dive)
  • 40% of employees leave their job because they are unhappy with it (IBM)
  • 20% of employees left their job because they were unhappy with the organization (IBM)
  • 51% of workers are looking to leave their current jobs (Gallup)

Employee Frustration

From https://www.shiftboard.com/blog/real-cost-employee-disengagement/

Now think about your own business… If these US based numbers are representative of the majority of workplaces, that boils down to your business being at risk.

Here are a few others relevant to why I am referring to this data:

  • 97% of employees think that data improves their job performance (Qlik)
  • 74% of employees believe their employers would value them more if their data literacy improved (Qlik)

So providing your most valuable resource, your people, with access to what is arguably your second most valuable resource, data & information, can help to mitigate the problem. Go figure…

I believe there’s another aspect to this that should be considered. Frustration is typically caused when people aren’t listened to or feel that they don’t have a platform through which they can be heard. Often our most innovative & creative people find themselves in this position. They are operating within the business, they can see how things can be improved to increase satisfaction for them and their colleagues and efficiency and effectiveness for the business, but they have no way of communicating that to the organisation. The result is that they leave. Your most innovative & creative people exit your business; the very people who can help. The net effect of that is that the people who remain are more than happy to accept the status quo whilst a critical ingredient to successful business and digital transformation has gone.

As we have worked with our clients successfully using LINQ to mobilize their business around information in response to the challenge of the Digital Economy, we’ve found that it enables that creativity to be easily shared through the business. LINQ is a quick and low-risk way of enabling your creatives to document a frustration (current state) and also provide you with a solution to it (future state) – with all of the evidence you could ask for.

Said another way, LINQ can help to remove your employee frustrations and if you believe the numbers associated with that, LINQ can help prevent major assets; people and money, from leaving your business.

Here are some additional articles of interest:

Disengaged Employees: The Domino Effect

The Enormous Cost of Unhappy Employees

Calculating the Cost of Employee Disengagement

Absenteeism and Presenteeism – The Cost to Employer

2017 Employee Engagement & Loyalty Statistics

If you’re ready to consider a new way of engaging your team, try LINQ out today.