Zombie Employees

What is a zombie employee?
Why do they keep looking alive and coming back, back, back!?

For my purposes a zombie employee is an employee that has been eviscerated by circumstance, lack of management support, health issues, or such. These employees often live the living death for years; showing up to work every day, not really contributing anything, maybe not even grumbling, just existing as the living dead in the workplace. The term "warm bodies" comes to mind - we hear this a lot when we talk about the upcoming productivity increase due to the harnessing of Watson, Siri, and the like. Warmbody employees are simply at the switch in case the power goes down or an unexpected program feature comes up that has undesirable effects.

What motivates zombie employees to keep coming back? In my opinion there are two major states of being in which the zombies may exist: knowing they are a zombie and not knowing. The most common state of being is Not Knowing. This employee has been so overwhelmed with criticism, negative feedback, or no feedback that they no longer act other than to show up. These employees take a lot of sick leave and may not have any friends at work. They are typically very passive. The other state is the knowing zombie. This employee is rarer, and is typically more edgy than the other. This zombie may be actively seeking "brains" and can be somewhat passive aggressive. The surrounding unknowing zombie employees may be actively shunning this edgy zombie as the status quo is being disrupted.

More thoughts another day!