When nearly half of employees feel disconnected, businesses face real risks: stalled productivity, churn, and stressed-out staff. Is this happening in your organisation?
The rise of the disconnected workforce
In this article we look at the causes of a disconnected workforce and the impact it could be having on your business. We also make some suggestions of things you could be doing to prevent disconnection and help resolve it.
What is a disconnected workforce and why does it matter?
The disconnected workforce, or disengaged workforce, is a hot topic in HR at present. It refers to employees who feel disengaged and isolated. They lack a sense of connection with their organisation, with their team or with their work. Disconnection occurs due to poor communication, lack of collaboration, remote work challenges, weak leadership, or unclear goals. This often results in lower productivity, higher turnover rates, and reduced job satisfaction, with real financial costs estimated by recruitment company Robert Walters to be around £340 billion every year in the UK alone.
What causes your workforce to become disconnected?
A workforce becomes disconnected when employees feel disengaged, undervalued, or isolated due to poor communication, weak leadership, or a lack of growth opportunities. When organisations fail to provide clear goals, regular feedback, and transparent communication, employees may struggle to understand their role and purpose, leading to decreased motivation. Leadership plays a crucial role in maintaining engagement, and when managers fail to support, recognise, or involve employees in decision-making, workers can feel overlooked and unappreciated.
Workplace culture also significantly impacts connection. A toxic or unsupportive environment, where employees experience favouritism, exclusion, or a lack of teamwork, can lead to disengagement. Additionally, excessive workloads, unrealistic expectations, and poor work-life balance can cause burnout, making employees emotionally detached from their work. In remote or hybrid settings, the physical separation from colleagues can create a sense of isolation, reducing collaboration and team cohesion.
A lack of career growth opportunities is another major factor. When employees do not see a path for development or advancement, they may lose motivation and become disengaged. Organisations that fail to invest in training, mentorship, and career progression risk losing employees who feel stagnant. Addressing these issues through strong leadership, communication, and engagement strategies is key to preventing workforce disconnection.
The true cost of a disconnected workforce on your business
Disengaged workforce costs can be felt at all levels, be that through lower productivity, increases in absenteeism and turnover with associated replacement costs, or through worsening customer experience.
Broadly speaking, when we talk about a disconnected workforce, we often group the costs into four areas:
Decreased Productivity
The decrease in productivity may not be immediately obvious, but the productivity issues are real from a disconnected workforce. Often, the people lack motivation and don't feel invested in their task, leading to slower work, missed deadlines, and lower efficiency. When employees are not invested in their tasks, overall business performance suffers, resulting in reduced output and revenue losses.
Indirectly, these productivity declines can then also put additional strain on engaged employees, causing those engaged workers to need to re-focus on more urgent, lower value work. Worse, it can cause stress and conflict, a feeling of being overworked or possibly burnout amongst those most productive reducing their productivity and leading to a worsening spiral.
Higher Employee Turnover
Disconnected employees are more likely to seek opportunities elsewhere. This increases recruitment, onboarding and training costs where you have to replace those employees.
Beyond the basic costs of replacing employees, high turnover can be very disruptive with the need to plan around change, affecting team morale, and often causes a loss of institutional knowledge that can then further challenge the team. Constant hiring and onboarding cycles drain company resources and create instability, ultimately impacting long-term growth and operational efficiency.
Poor Customer Experience
Employees who feel disconnected often provide lower-quality service, negatively affecting customer satisfaction. According to a Gallup study a disengaged workforce leads to an 18% decrease in sales and 23% decrease in profitability.
A disengaged workforce is more prone to making mistakes, showing a lack of enthusiasm, and slow response times. This decline in service quality can result in customer dissatisfaction, lost business, and reputational damage, making it harder to win and retain clients.
Increased Absenteeism and Workplace Conflict
Disengaged employees may take more unplanned absences, disrupting daily operations and increasing costs for temporary staffing and overtime or placing additional pressure and distractions on the remaining employees. A lack of connection within teams can also lead to communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, and conflicts. Poor workplace relationships reduce collaboration and can create a toxic work environment, further affecting overall business performance.
How do I spot the signs of a disconnected workforce?
By simply asking your employees the right questions at the right time, the signs quickly become obvious. A short pulse survey that checks in regularly with your team will help you to spot things before they get too bad and give you the information you need so you can course-correct quickly. The "annual employee engagement survey" is a great place to start, but if you're only asking once each year, you're probably not going to spot the changes in a timely fashion.
Make sure you're asking the right questions. Pulse surveys need to be short and focussed - no more than 7-10 questions - to avoid employees getting bored and providing low-quality, less meaningful responses. The questions you should be asking will vary so that they're specific to your industry and organisation, but should still be meaningful to the employee experience. At Ten Space, clients can use their own questions, but we often find the best results when we work with clients around to build employee survey questions around The Ten Space Employee Engagement Model, which has been built to help focus on getting actionable insight from employee surveys in the real world.
How can I fix my disconnected workforce problem?
Once you've identified that you have a problem with a disconnected workforce, you're going to want to fix it. But before you start trying to make any changes, there is one very important thing to consider:
How will I know if my changes have been worked?
Obviously you're going to be looking at key people metrics such as staff turnover or absentee rates, but those are typically lagging indicators that may take a long time to show any change.
The quickest way to get feedback is by asking the workforce as part of your regular pulse survey and tracking the responses over time. To get the best (and easiest) results, use an employee survey platform like Ten Space that can regularly ask the same questions with minimal effort for you, and report them back in a way that is right for your business. When you're looking for an employee survey platform to help you, make sure that it is designed to help you understand not just your one-off responses, but how they change over time.
If you're doing this, great! As it happens, just the act of asking employees can help to improve employee engagement and reduce disconnection in the short term. However, for it to be effective in the longer term, you need to demonstrate that you're actually listening by taking action and making sure that everybody knows about the great actions you've taken.
Now you know how you'll going to know the actions you're taking are working, you need to start planning and taking those actions. The exact things you'll need to do are going to be specific to your business, but you will want to consider some key things. First is to understand the nature and cause of your disconnected workforce - is it a systemic, organisation-wide issue or is it just a particular team, department, or a group of employees e.g. middle-management or those with a particular length of service. If you've been gathering data through employee pulse surveys with an employee survey tool like Ten Space, the reporting should help you to spot those trends.
Next, as you likely already know, communication is key. Start with your senior leaders to make sure that they understand the issue and are bought in to solving it. In some organisations, providing information such as comparisons of engagement scores between departments can encourage healthy competition between leaders, but this approach is definitely not right for all organisations. Once your senior leaders are bought in, understand the problem and impact, it will be much easier to take the actions needed.
We often find that communication is a key part of any solution. Obvious things like pay and benefits will always come up as "areas of concern", but we often find that improving the sense of belonging is a great place to start at low cost and that is often caused by less-than-perfect communication and collaboration. Encouraging things in teams like such as our "what are your superpowers" activity can really help boost that.
You may find that additional training for your leaders can help too. At Ten Space, we regularly see clients who find that the senior leaders may say (and do) the right things, but the message can get diluted as it passes down through the various layers. This is seldom intentional, but often leads to questions at the lower levels like "what does that mean to me?" which can be improved by working with those in the middle to better enable them to share the message. Dialling up the approachability of senior leaders through town halls, "ask me anything" chats and skip-level conversations can also often help.
Turning Insight into Action, and Action into Results
Collecting survey data is just the start. Acting on those insights—communicating changes, making improvements, and following up—shows employees that their voices matter. This cycle of listening and responding is key to building trust and long-term engagement and fixing your issues with disconnected workforce.
If you want to use employee surveys to collect data from your employees, Ten Space can help. Contact us for a free chat about how we can help you to reconnect with your disconnected workforce
