Employee Disengagement and Return-to-Office Policies

I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is September 14, 2024.

I talk a lot about employee engagement in this forum and about the costs/dangers of employee disengagement. According to a recent Gallup survey, for the full year 2023, only 33% of employees are ‘engaged’ in their work—a slight uptick from the previous year’s number of 32%. More importantly, the proportion of employees who are actively disengaged fell slightly to 16% from a 2022 high of 18%. While this represents a small year-over-year improvement, Gallup estimates that the impacts of active disengagement amount to $1.9 trillion of lost productivity in the US. Putting it into perspective, that’s a whopping 8% of US GDP. Just imagine the lift in economic growth, equity markets, trade, etc., that would accompany a significant reduction in active disengagement!

If you think poor management practices don’t impact the macro economy, think again. Poor management practices impact your company’s culture, its bottom line, industry, and ultimately macroeconomic performance.

In my second book, The Balanced Business, I talk about the accidental manager. The costs of not investing in excellence in leadership and management are real and those costs are high.

With the Gallup poll on engagement as a backdrop, imagine my dismay to read the reports that PwC will begin tracking the location of their employees in the UK as part of an effort to police their return-to-office policies. Ugh.

The Covid-19 pandemic represented a global-scale natural experiment in work-from-home and hybrid work models, and many businesses made significant progress in balancing employee desire for autonomy and work-life flexibility with the need for accountability and productivity. While many businesses continue to invest in new ways of working that enhance engagement and simultaneously improve consumer outcomes, some are showing their true colors and slipping back into old-school, directive management styles that require teams and individual contributors to spend time in the office.

Was it the most efficient and culture-enhancing business model to require employees to fight traffic so they can sit in a cube all day with the occasional break for trips to the bathroom, water cooler, and break room? On a macro scale, the data points to an emphatic ‘no’ to this question. Is the structure of the physical working environment and its impact on culture unique to a particular company’s business model? Certainly—there are many environments where in-person interaction is essential to success. Do employees hate being treated like children when they’re told what to do—especially when the data and experiences in other businesses belie the messages they’re getting from their management team? Oh heck ya!

So here’s today’s message to employers:

Hey leaders! Did you get the memo that your people hate being treated like coin-operated machines and that improvements in employee engagement can significantly enhance your company’s culture and its bottom line? Note that your decisions to play big brother and force your people back into the office based on your feelings that people work better face-to-face, or to improve the ‘payoff’ to your existing real estate investments are adding to employee dissatisfaction and disengagement. Oh, and if you’re contemplating geo-tracking your people like PwC will start doing in the UK to ensure compliance with your office policies, I would seriously reconsider doing so. Treating your most valuable resource—your people—like children is the fast pass to more disengagement.

It will be fascinating to watch the impact of PwC’s decision to track the location data of its people in the UK on engagement. My prediction is that this experiment will not go well.

Nothing says “I don’t trust you” more than draconian HR policies that are spread like peanut butter over the employee population in an attempt to snare a few bad apples who are likely disengaged and working against the best interests of the company and the rest of the team. The solution? Improve the skill level of managers across the organization through intentional learning and development programs and make it clear through incentives that excellence is rewarded and poor performance/disengagement are not. The bad apples will opt out and head for more fertile pastures to apply their mediocre skills and display their poor work ethic for all to see.

Next week, we’re going to continue this conversation with a message to employees. As you might imagine, employee engagement is a shared responsibility between employer and employee. To imagine that employers are the only ones not holding up their end of the employee engagement bargain would be foolhardy of me. Next week, we’ll take a look at the other side of the equation.

Have a wonderful weekend…