Nine Ways to Disengage your Employees

Employee engagement has been all the rage for so long that we sometimes forget the value of employee disengagement.

Want your best and brightest to flee? Want rumors and grumbling at all-time highs? Want lower productivity and increased sick time and stress leaves?

Follow these nine steps, and you can achieve results beyond your wildest dreams:

1) Use bloated, imprecise language to make sure your business goals and strategies remain a secret to your employees, suppliers and clients. See The Gobbledegook Manifesto, and do the reverse of what’s suggested.

2) Demand regular, lengthy meetings for every department, work unit and project team. have lengthy regular meetings that repeat many of the same things that have no relevance to individual employees. Provide no training, mentoring or reinforcement of effective meeting techniques. Avoid effective meetings by not referring to Manager Tools.

3) Lock down access to instant messaging, Facebook, personal e-mail and other ways for people to stay in touch with colleagues and family members, even though employees are putting in unpaid overtime on project work and travel. Make sure everyone, including the media, knows this is because you don’t trust your employees. The foolish arguments against blocking can be seen at the Stop Blocking blog.

4) Assign credit for major accomplishments to one executive. Explore opportunities for this corporate leader to be profiled in major publications, explaining how their go-go management style single-handedly resulted in a new product launch. Make sure employees from these projects get a copy of the media coverage, with a memo reinforcing the executive’s brilliant leadership.

5) Announce a new way of doing things every six months, tied to a management trend the human resources manager or the COO saw at a conference. Hire expensive outside consultants to “drive change” into the organization. This works best if employees can see the consultants trade in their old cars for Hummers and BMW convertibles partway through the change process. If you can’t decide on a bold new change initiative, just pick one from the list at random.

6) Make a big show of management’s openness, transparency and trustworthiness at a company-wide Trust Exercise. Next week, introduce efficiency measures that remove senior management meeting records from the intranet.

7) Show that your organization “gets” social media by launching a CEO podcast, as a companion to their dormant blog. Post the first one at a launch event. Post the second one three months later. Don’t post a third one.

8) Live the corporate values and walk the talk, but reward managers who cut corners and undercut other parts of the organization.

9) Systematize employee recognition, setting quotas for praise. Model the desired behavior by praising work units that weren’t involved in a project. Encourage Management by Walking Around, in which high-level managers dispense recognition randomly.

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These methods will deliver the desired results. But don’t stop there. Only you can find the most effective methods for your organization. Use these as a jumping-off point. Brainstorm to find your own company-specific demotivators. Tweak your disengagement efforts, based on measurement.

Don’t let setbacks stop you. It’s important to have faith in your ability to crush morale, even if some naysayers question your goals or your tactics.

And remember, success in this area can lead to speaking gigs at conferences, maybe even a book deal.

The time to get started is now! The time to doubt yourself is never!

See other Checklists in CommonsensePR.

See the other Worst Things posts from the other b5 media Business Channel blogs.

Link for #5 via Miki Saxon and Guy Kawasaki. Poster via Despair Inc.

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Tags: employee engagement, morale, business, corporate, communications, management, CEOs, mistakes, stupidity, tips, anti-tips