Unhappy employee – grief in the company

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, employee engagement, satisfaction, and understanding of company goals have declined. According to Gallup analysts, this is due both to difficulties in working interaction when switching to remote work, and to additional responsibilities and increased customer demands. Decreased employee engagement costs US employers $1.9 trillion a year.

Employee job dissatisfaction and related lack of engagement cost U.S. companies $1.9 trillion last year. This conclusion was reached by the research company Gallup, which today, January 23, published Survey data on people’s work engagement. The company says it came up by “calculating the dollar productivity losses associated with employee disengagement and active disengagement” based on a statistical model of how engagement affects productivity.

Gallup notes that engagement and job satisfaction have declined since the start of the pandemic: this indicator rose for several years in a row, but fell sharply after 2020. According to the survey, only a third of employees (33%) are fully involved in their work, interested and satisfied with it. For comparison: in 2020 this figure was 36%. The minimum level was recorded in 2022 – 32%.

About half of those surveyed said they put in only the minimum amount of effort necessary to work—researchers have already called this “quiet withdrawal (from work.— “Kommersant”)”.

The share of those whom the Gallup poll calls “actively disengaged” in work is also significant—18% in 2022 and 16% in 2023, versus 13% in 2018–2019. The company’s research is based on surveys conducted quarterly online, with between 18,000 and 20,000 people participating in different quarters of 2023.

Gallup’s senior researcher on workplace practices, Jim Harter, noted that employee motivation relates to “many different metrics that are important to an organization.” According to him, among other things, many employees do not understand what the employer wants from them, but at the same time they would like “their work to be connected with something greater than themselves.” The study notes that workers feel more disconnected from and less satisfied with their companies than before. In addition, they have a worse understanding of the company’s mission and goals.

Remote workers especially often do not understand what is expected of them—twice as often as those who work from the office.

However, the involvement of the latter has also decreased. According to Gallup analysts, among the reasons for the decline in engagement and deterioration in task understanding are the restructuring carried out by many companies, which is why workers are often less familiar with their colleagues. 64% of managers also admit that employees have additional responsibilities. Many note that customers have become more demanding, especially when it comes to quick responses to their online requests.

Another reason: 70% of executives admit that they have no experience leading a hybrid team working from both the office and home, and they do not understand how to improve efficiency in this format.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya