In our recent blog, The Great Detachment, we reported on Gallup’s 2024 findings showing a worrying lack of post-pandemic employee engagement in the US, and the reasons for this.
Just over half (51%) of US workers say they’re looking for a new job or eyeing up the job boards. They’ve mentally checked out, and at the highest levels since 2015.
They’re not quitting though. They’re staying, they’re going through the motions, but they’re disconnected, and certainly not giving their best.
In this follow-up piece, we suggest what leaders can do to reverse detachment, apathy and disengagement. We explore how team leaders and managers can communicate more effectively to re-engage, reassure and motivate detached workers.
It may feel like an impossible challenge to regain trust when half the team seems to have checked out, but it is possible, and it starts with creating a psychologically safer environment for employee feedback, concerns and everyday communication.
Gallup’s own analysis talks about the importance of connecting individual contributions to organisational mission and purpose. People want to know their work matters and that their employer makes a difference in the world. Mission and purpose also bond people together. Highly engaged employees feel like they belong to a community, not just a job.
To achieve this, we know that the most effective leaders communicate an inspiring vision that people want to get behind. This is critical at the organisational level, but ultimately, the connection must be made at the team level.
Employees need their managers to show them why their effort makes a difference. This takes good communication skills and needs a healthy two-way communication culture.
The root cause of disengagement might not just be about your workplace culture. Not everyone comes to work with the same values, goals or mindset.
It helps to identify what being at work means for contrasting personalities. Reasons for detachment could be as straightforward as lack of recognition, mismatched role expectations or perceived career growth.
Finding out might be a challenge if disruptive communication issues have reared their heads. In too many organisations, people work in distrustful silos, driven by a culture of rapid change-era suspicion and misunderstandings.
Questions to ask yourself about your team:
Adopting a common language will help. Market factors will always come and go, and it’s natural for humans to attach and detach on occasion, but if leaders and team members can employ a common language that offers them a way to communicate more easily without judgement, it may help them get to the heart of concerns and re-engage valuable contributors.
Some readers here will be familiar with the Insights Discovery psychometric tool. Through this self-awareness programme, individuals are offered a common language – the language of colour energies. It connects colleagues across geographical and cultural boundaries and provides a safe platform for feedback conversations.
Based on Jungian psychology and presented through a simple, four-colour model, this system enables individuals to see their unique mix of ‘colour energies’: Fiery Red, Sunshine Yellow, Earth Green and Cool Blue.
Where some team members may be more logical, practical and factual in their approach (typically the Thinking preferences favoured by Fiery Red and Cool Blue), others (with the Feeling preferences of Sunshine Yellow and Earth Green) may lead with more empathy, sensitivity and creativity.
Motivations often show up like this:
Fiery Red - Assertive, determined, and direct. “Be brief. Be bright. Be gone.“
Sunshine Yellow - Sociable, dynamic, and enthusiastic. “Involve me.”
Earth Green - Caring, encouraging, and patient. “Show me you care.”
Cool Blue - Analytical, precise, and cautious. “Give me your details.”
Everyone has every colour energy within them, but they prefer, or are more comfortable with, some over others. These are the ones you’ll recognise in them most often. It is this unique mix that determines how and why people behave the way they do, and why they may detach more readily from certain situations.
Basing your conversations with the team around colours may seem unusual. But for thousands of teams across the globe, it has liberated the way they communicate. Linking people’s values and behavioural preferences at work around the Insights Discovery model has transformed team effectiveness in hundreds of organisations, large and small.
To engage detached team members, you’ll need to tune into the values and preferences of each colleague. Understanding their colour characteristics can be hugely beneficial. Once you really understand how your colleagues work, you can accommodate their projects, tasks and ways of working in a way that best suits their preferences and communication needs.
Psychologically safe feedback is a gift that transforms attitudes. A healthy workplace culture for most of us is one where people can contribute their ideas, their opinions, their suggestions. It allows a sense of ownership over the work that they’re doing and more of a connection with the company.
The language of colour energies means you can have a non-judgmental, non-confrontational conversation about what’s missing or what’s jarring for that person and how things could work better.
We hear a lot in the workplace about the need for greater self-awareness. Understanding yourself better, and recognising deep-rooted motivations, blind spots and stress triggers are invaluable tools for developing personally and professionally.
But it’s also about ‘other awareness’. Leaders who include both self-awareness and team-awareness programmes for their employees alongside career coaching, career planning, training, mentoring are likely to find that performance reviews and feedback conversations are more effective and more illuminating. Exploring the ins and outs of how a team actually works together - and how this aligns with how each individual likes to work - has a serious impact on how effectively teams collaborate.
Where feedback is concerned, being able to explore in a trusted common language framework how people feel about working in particular ways, settings or team structures shines a spotlight on their comfort zones, sense of purpose and development needs. They’re able to recognise how their dominant colour energy influences their daily conversations, their interaction with contrasting personalities and their responses to workplace challenges.
At Insights we do this through Insights Discovery Full Circle, a psychologically-safe 360 feedback tool based on the same principles as Insights Discovery, with significant additions and learning opportunities.
The language of colour also helps leaders understand people’s reactions to change. The Gallup report cites rapid organisation change as one of the main reasons for detachment, with three out of four employees report experiencing disruptive change this year. The Insights Thriving Through Change programme helps us understand why some people flourish during change, while others withdraw.
Of course, the labour market has its cycles. When organisations bounce back, thousands of detached, disengaged people will find opportunities to jump ship. Businesses may lose the ‘detached’ people they failed to support.
The Gallup report reinforces that if you want to keep your people, it’s not an option to do nothing when you know they’re disengaged.
There’s little doubt that it pays to understand your teams better, improve how you communicate and help them communicate with you and each other more effectively. If you can help colleagues be more conscious of how they talk, act and respond, you’re likely to see a more respectful, productive working environment.
Employing the language of colour energies as a framework for better communication lays the foundations for empathy, adaptability, and mutual respect – key ingredients for keeping disaffected colleagues engaged.
When we all must do more with less and detachment has become a real challenge, adopting a universal language that can help people collaborate, shape performance management discussions and improve organisational culture is meaningful business decision.
High performing teams are non-negotiable for successful organisations. Insights Discovering Team Effectiveness helps you tackle your most pressing team challenges on two fronts: how your team likes to work together and how well they work together. It provides practical and sustainable tools to help your teams collaborate effectively for success today and long into the future.