Wild Horses
Every year the Gallup Workforce Survey comes out with the same depressing reflection of the state of the workplace in the 21st Century. Once again it reports that engagement levels are in the toilet, just like they were last year, and the year before that, and the one before that … in fact, ever since they started doing these in 2000. I reckon people are more enthusiastic about their own funerals than they are about their jobs.
I’ve always found these reports gob-smacking, a crushing indictment of how organisations are led and managed and of the system that supports them. But it’s just been normalised, hasn’t it? I mean, if it’s not caused any change in over two decades, then it’s ‘just the way things are’. This, in itself, is a crushing indictment of the faux concern but actual disinterest of the people who run organisations.
The global figure for employee engagement is 23% but for the UK it’s 10%. Not as bad as France (7%) or as ‘good’ as Germany (15%), it’s of a piece with most of Western Europe. The newer democracies of eastern Europe are higher, whilst Scandinavian countries and Portugal are above the Western Europe (I wonder what they have in common?? Apart from a social contract that hasn’t been shredded by neoliberalism…).
And so … so what? Same as usual. Nothing’s changed, nothing to see here. Move on, let’s argue about whether people should have to go to the office every day, or which yoga sessions are better for ‘wellbeing’. Except that Mark C Crowley (of Lead from the Heart book and podcast fame) questioned whether the UK figure was right, and if so, why?
I can’t resist a baited hook like that, so I weighed in with my ‘hot take’ and whilst I was tapping away I found myself getting angrier and angrier, and thinking of more and more reasons why. What was really getting me angry was that no-one is talking about them!! And if you don’t talk about the causes, you sure as hell aren’t going to improve matters, which is why the numbers have remained rooted to the floor despite the huge amount of money and effort thrown at ‘employee engagement’ and ‘wellbeing’ initiatives.
So I ditched the Not-Newsletter I’d already written and you’re getting this instead because we really need to talk about this stuff !!!
Street Fighting Man
The subtext behind Mark’s tweet was ‘Is it really that bad? That’s not what I’m seeing.’ (If it’s not, Mark, then please correct me! But it’s a reasonable challenge, in my view) Some of the responses supported Mark’s scepticism, suggesting other sources that showed levels of 30-40%, although this was qualified as being in tech.
But Gallup’s methodology is solid and has produced consistent reports over decades, so it must be right. So the question is why is the perception different to the reality?
The perception is based upon what is directly experienced and read in the media. I suggest both of these are unrepresentative sources.
Someone like Mark, who has a positive message of change, is likely to be engaged by (and so with) organisations who are looking to be more progressive in their approach and to be quite sizeable, probably global operations. In other words, the top echelon of businesses in the UK, say, the top 10%.
The media is similarly focused on this echelon because they are the guys with the money. The business media also (or perhaps consequently) has a positivity bias, always looking for good news stories and putting their actual or potential advertising clients in a positive light. So they write about the best, or promote people and companies as being amongst the best (with many a ‘fall from grace’ following later).
This suggests there is a big difference between the top 10% and the rest, something we also see reflected in productivity. The UK has a significant and historical productivity gap with it’s nearest competitors but the top 10% are not the problem because they are just as productive as their global rivals. The productivity problems lies within the other 90%.
And so I suggest the engagement problem in the UK lies in the 90% (although it has to be said that some of the top 10% aren’t exactly ripping up trees either), which is where the majority of the workforce are found. So they’re actually doing worse than the average.
Houston, we have a problem.
Heart Of Stone
I joined the workforce back in the 1980s. I don’t have the exact figures but most people worked for a UK-owned organisation or a publicly-owned one. Since then, foreign ownership has grown enormously, whilst privatisation has moved a lot of organisations out of the public sector and into foreign or private-equity ownership. The outsourcing of public service delivery has furthered these trends.
This has led, in my view, to a significant degree of detachment and a reduced sense of of belonging and purpose. I offer, as a case study, our water companies, which have been subjected to privatisation and ownership by foreign interests and Private Equity. Our water industry used to be the envy of the world, it’s expertise sought by by many countries. Since then, it has been asset-stripped, loaded with debt, under-invested and is now famous for filling our seas and rivers with shit. Do you think employees proudly talk about the company they work for as they used to, or do you think that change the subject when asked what they do for a living?
There’s also been a considerable take-over by US companies in recent years, something that has gone largely unremarked. Large parts of the UK economy is in the hands of US companies, and large number of employees are working, directly or indirectly, for US interests. The importation of US business and employment practices is unlikely to have had a positive impact on employee experience (if you doubt this, just spend a few minutes looking at the Antiwork reddit).
A point that I didn’t make in my reply to Mark was the erosion of employee rights that has been the policy of the Conservative-led government’s of the past 14 years, perhaps to accommodate the demands of these foreign owners. Again, that’s not going to make employees feel warmer about their employment.
Some of these are broader forces, such as globalisation and the internet, but they have been accentuated in the UK as matters of policy.
And people aren’t happy about it.
Paint It Black
I continued in my reply to Mark:
‘No real increase in pay for a decade. Higher working hours. Cost of living squeeze. People can’t …Afford to buy a house but rental costs are rising above inflation. Childcare is insane and they can’t afford to have kids. So jobs don’t deliver a reasonable quality of living anymore (in work poverty at an all-time high). Why would they be engaged? They’re mostly just surviving.’
It is futile to talk about employee engagement without taking in the broader context and the social, political and economic pressures that people are under.
It’s not just that work is worse, life is worse. I started out with the expectation that a good job would provide a good lifestyle for me. I would be able to buy a house, to have a family and to experience a rising standard of living. Indeed, those were the aspirations that my governments and my employers held for also at that time.
That’s no longer the case. In fact, the opposite is true. In this last parliament, living standards have falling. Life expectancy is dropping. Our children are shorter, fatter and more unhealthy. The media is obsessed with culture wars and the definition of what a woman is or isn’t whilst large numbers of people are at work and on benefits, forced to rely on food banks because there’s too much month at the end of the money.
Meanwhile, our employers seem to care little for us. They use redundancy as a way to massage the figures. They push people out when they decide their long service makes them ‘too expensive’. They salami-slice benefits whilst suppressing pay. They use practices like ‘fire and rehire’ and zero-hours contracts to push down people costs and avoid employment overheads. They put more effort into avoiding taxes than looking after their people.
In short, work is much worse (longer hours, more demanding) and the rewards are lower, not only in terms of the money that you get but also the lifestyle that money can buy for you.
The phrase you hear most of all in the UK right now is ‘Everything is broken’. To say that the mood is downbeat is to significantly talk it up.
Against this backdrop, I’m surprised engagement is holding up at 10%.
Gallup’s report backs this up. In countries that have a more optimistic outlook, engagement and well-being is higher (although these are two sides of the same coin, imho). It’s also higher where there are good labour protections, and where it’s easy to change jobs (a consequence of social and economic factors).
We’re in the middle of an election and it seems highly likely that a new party with be in charge. They will move the dial in a favourable direction in some of these areas but we need business and government to be unified in achieving more ambitious objectives. It is in their interest to have high aspirations for us all, for everyone to have a better and improving life. We’ve been in a downward spiral for the past few decades, we have to believe we can turn it into a positive one once again.
Then people might start to feel like their job is worth getting engaged in.
Sympathy For The Devil
Which brings me to my final point.
What right have organisations got to expect employee engagement in the first place?
And why the hell should employees be engaged with their work anyway?
Employment is a transaction, at it’s heart. You agree to provide labour under the direction of your employer in return for pay. Like much else of today’s workplace, it is rooted in the factory, where the labour was physical and highly directed. You got paid according to the hours that you were present. All that was asked was your physical presence and effort.
Somewhere over the past several decades, companies added in that you had to give them emotional commitment as well. It wasn’t enough to fulfil the terms of your contract, you now had to ‘be engaged’ and ‘be part of the culture’. We can see this has happened because they have labeled sticking to the terms your contract with a pejorative label, “Quiet Quitting”. If you’d have used such a term when I started work, people would have looked at you as if you were mad. You weren’t expected to give more unless you got rewarded for it (with things like ‘overtime’ and ‘time-and-a-half’ or time off in lieu for working at weekends).
And all the time they’ve been demanding more, they’ve been providing less.
So why should employees accede to their unreasonable and unjustified demands?
Why should employees make an emotional commitment to their employer when it it is not reciprocated? When businesses remains silent on the issues that impact their lives more broadly? When organisations ignore the broader context that their employees find themselves in?
For example, childcare in the UK is in a dire state. It’s ridiculously expensive, variable in quality and almost impossible to find in some ares. This severely impacts the ability of parents to work, with the burden falling largely on women. Many, finding they are working to pay for someone else to look after their children, decide to stop work altogether. We are faced with a shortage of workers, yet
childcare is stopping many women from filling that gap. Why are employers not screaming at the government to fix it, why are they not campaigning for plentiful and affordable childcare as a key piece of infrastructure for a healthy economy, and society?
If companies don’t see their employees as more than hired hands, why should employees see themselves as more either?
All this brings me back to the thought that started me on this path some years ago, when in response to the question “How do we improve employee engagement?”, my response was “Well, you could start by giving a shit about them”.
Only that takes a lot more than giving out some self-care packages.
Back when I started, organisations did give a shit, they did care. Not just about the individual, but about the society they operated in. But back then, organisations were part of that society. Now they are just faceless economic entities run by psychopaths.
So why should employees give a shit about them?
Miss You
And finally … as yet used to say on News At Ten
It is reported that Dell’s abysmal and abusive ‘Return to Office’ policy (which I sunk my teeth into here) is proving a predictable and gratifying failure. Threatened with not being in line for promotions if they didn’t return to the office, 50% of Dell’s US employees said ‘Okey Dokey’ and opted to carry on working remotely. The improvement in their quality of life is simply to great to give up and a lot more valuable than some crappy promotion. And being subjected to ‘management by flag’.
It seems a lot of Dell employees are also looking to get jobs elsewhere. I wonder why?
They’re certainly now engaged in their employment. Only not in a good way - for Dell.