Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say No Selecta)
The Gallup report for this year is out. The headline that they used on the webinar about it was that ‘Employee Engagement is highest ever!’
It’s up 1%. To 23%. Woo-hoo!
Almost 1 in 4 people are engaged in their work!!! Bring on the fireworks and the DJ, it’s time to party!!!
No?
No.
Let’s be honest, these are not so much the ‘best’ as the ‘least terrible’ employee engagement levels, in a long sequence of terrible figures. And most of the increase is due to improvements in South Asia (primarily India).
In US and Canada it’s actually dropped a couple of points to 31%. In Europe it’s stayed at 13% (it’s even lower at 10% in the UK).
All of this, despite a whole ‘employee engagement’ industry arising in the past decade or so, consuming huge amounts of time, money and energy. Which either means that none of that stuff works, or that things would be massively worse if that stuff wasn’t happening.
This is not a problem that’s going to be solved with a few engagement programmes and ‘community help’ days. In fact, it’s not even a problem. It’s the outcome of the system. People are disengaged at work because work is disengaging; because organisations don’t care about them; because they have been dehumanised and reduced to replaceable cogs in a machine that turns for no discernible reason other than to make shareholders richer at everyone else’s (and the planet’s) expense.
Until the system changes, disengagement (which Gallup have renamed ‘Quiet Quitting’ in a misjudged effort to grab the zeitgeist) will remain the norm.
Still, the upside is that I still have plenty of work to do to Decrapify Work.
Walls Come Tumbling Down
Some of us have been wanging on about this for ages (I know, I know, you’re thinking “You’re telling us???! We have to listen to it!”).
It’s eight years since I went to an open space event on “Why are organisations not shifting?”. There was a good number of us there who could see there were better ways to work, a need to make work more human-centred and a host of good tools, techniques and strategies to do it. We were trying to figure out why so few organisations weren’t embracing what, to us, seemed a win-win and a no-brainer.
We didn’t really come up with any answers there and then but it put me in touch with a bunch of like-minded people who, in a variety of different ways, have moved things forward. Through discussions, through sharing ideas and approaches, through working with willing organisations and generally banging the drum for positive change.
We felt then that this shift was inevitable and the pressure was building on the tectonic plates of ‘the status’ quo and ‘the new progressive methods’. The ground was shaking and it was only a matter of time before the shift happened, an earthquake of change.
Well, we were proved to be starry-eyed optimists. Like Californians sitting on the San Andreas fault, we were still waiting for ‘the big one’ and it seemed like it might never happen.
And then something unexpected came along - COVID. Within a matter of weeks, people were dispersed from their office to their homes and flung into the virtual realm. This wasn’t a change arising from enlightened self-interest by the organisations, it was Nature putting it’s hand in the small of their back and giving them a bloody good shove.
It wasn’t perfect. In fact, it was a bit of shit-show. People sitting on their beds staring at a laptop, stuck on endless Zoom meetings and unable to go and socialise or relax. In many ways, it absolutely sucked.
But, it turned out, lots of people preferred it to the office. They preferred the autonomy and the freedom, the trust they had unexpectedly had placed upon them, the choice over how they used their time.
So a shift had happened but not where we expected.
We thought it would be a shift in the organisations and how the leaders thought about work but that hasn’t happened. In fact, they seem to view the change to a more flexible working practices, whether they call it hybrid/remote/distributed, as a passing irritation and they are trying hard to retrench to the past.
Instead, the shift has happened amongst the employees, a shift in their mindset and their perspective. They now know what is possible, for their work and their life. They are not going to forget, they are not going to unsee or, more importantly, unfeel it.
They’ve seen what the future could be and they are determined to bring it about.
Back to the Gallup report, perhaps that’s why 51% are intending to leave their job. The ‘Great Resignation’ is not an event, it’s the ‘new normal’.
Its The End Of The World As We Know It
Its still quite hard to get a clear picture of what’s happening as work changes in the wake of the pandemic. Whilst we look for generalised effects, each organisation faces a different situation and different factors move at different speeds. Whilst big tech companies can, and do, sack people and cut workforce numbers quickly, their office portfolios take much longer to adjust.
It seems some of the bigger companies are winding back on hybrid working and not only insisting that people spend more days in the office but enforcing it with more monitoring and sanctions. This seems especially true of banking and the big Tech companies, who have the financial muscle and prestige to impose their will on employees.
But other companies are embracing the opportunity to change. A finance director of a company that had been able to downsize their office space by embracing hybrid work pointed out that it had increased their free cash flow by 10 to 20 times. No, I don’t really understand what that means but I know enough to tell it’s a good thing and this guy seemed to think it was a compelling reason for change.
The thing is, that’s only the half it. Even less, perhaps. The bigger wins are in the adoption of better working practices, better recruitment, happier employees and releasing the latent potential they have. We knew back at that unconference that organisations that put people at the heart of what they do outperform conventional hierarchical ones. The advances in technology, tools and techniques have turbo-charged that performance advantage.
I think the organisations that are dragging people back into the office are making a major strategical error. It will come at a premium and, whilst the banks and tech co’s making the headlines can afford it, other organisations will find it fatal. However, as well as that cost premium, they are missing out on the uplift in productivity and performance that’s on offer.
My guess is that some of them are banking on AI delivering a bigger advantage. That’s chasing a unknown whilst ignoring a known. Another strategic error, perhaps, but entirely consistent with the mindset that we have seen is prevalent in the C-suite of large organisations. Why do all that messy people stuff when you can just buy in some tech and a few smart people?
And they wonder why peolpe are so disengaged.
I Want You
I’ve been on quite a journey since that unconference back in 2015 and I’ve learnt a huge amount. It led to me starting Decrapify Work over three years ago and connecting with another bunch of like-spirited people on LinkedIN, then starting this newsletter.
Now I’m ready to get back to working with some people one-on-one. Perhaps you’re in a an organisation and you want to make some change happen but don’t know how - or, to put it another way, you want to be a Pirate in the Navy but don’t want to get strung up for doing it.
Maybe you feel your are stuck in a love/hate relationship with your work - you love what you are doing and the people you work with but the rest of the place drives you nuts - and you want to find a way of moving forward without walking out.
Maybe your corporate career has come to an unexpected end, you’ve been ejected and you really don’t want to go back in but you’re not sure how to transition to something else.
These are all situations I have been in during my career (they are practically the three stages of it) and I can help you navigate these tricky waters.
Or perhaps you just want a listening and a sounding board for ideas. Or just someone who pays attention to you and you alone for an hour every week or so.
I’m only looking to work with a few people at a time, so if you’d be interested, drop me an email or a LinkedIN DM and we’ll set up a chat and see where it goes. If nothing else, I will be good to connect and get to know each other!
And if you’d just like to do that, then let me know and we’ll set it up.
Do You Love Me?
This week also see the release of the latest episode of Work Punks, where we discuss ridiculous leadership advice (do you know how to be a bit more of a narcissist?), bad research and good ways to be a leader. I think it’s our best one yet, I’d love to hear what your views are. You can watch it here