The Simple Reason Why Employees Are Less Engaged Now Than They Were In 2020, According To A Career Expert
Spoiler alert: It's the companies' own fault — and they're learning all the wrong lessons.
PeopleImages from Getty Images Signature / Canva Pro Workers by and large are deeply disengaged from their jobs — and it's costing companies heaps of money.
That's what a new study has found, and it's sending many employers into a frenzy of trying to get to the bottom of the problem. But the answer, one expert says, could not possibly be simpler.
Employees are less engaged now than in 2020, at the height of the pandemic.
That finding seems totally counterintuitive, of course. Why would we workers have been more into our jobs amid the grief and terror of those dark days in 2020 when the pandemic upended everything?
You would think that era would have been the absolute nadir for employee engagement — it's hard to put your heart and soul into your job when your very life and those of your loved ones are on the line, after all. But a new Gallup study found the complete opposite.
Just 33% of employees were engaged at their jobs in 2023, amounting to $1.9 trillion in lost productivity.
Gallup did its annual look into employee engagement — how dedicated, focused, and happy employees are with not only the work they do day-to-day but with their management, bosses, and the companies they work for as a whole. Suffice to say, the findings were not good.
Some 67% of employees told Gallup they are disengaged, meaning they feel detached from their employers, dissatisfied with the companies they work for, disconnected from their mission and purpose, and unclear about what is even expected of them at work.
This isn't exactly surprising given all the talk of "quiet quitting" and anger over moves like return-to-office mandates that many companies implemented last year.
But in context, the finding is downright shocking. Gallup has been studying employee engagement since the year 2000, and engagement reached its all-time high of 40% not in the comparatively halcyon days of the 2000s but in the dark days of 2020.
Yes, you read that right: In 23 years, workers were the most engaged and satisfied in their jobs amid a terrifying pandemic. What the heck is going on here? Why is that employees are less engaged now than in 2020?
Expert Bonnie Dilber says it's simple: Companies actually cared about employees during the pandemic and showed it.
Bonnie Dilber is a recruiter in the tech industry and a prolific TikToker who discusses topics pertaining to careers and the workplace. When she saw Gallup's new study, one key sentence in the researcher's report stood out: "[Workers] are also less likely to feel someone at work cares about them as a person."
Dilber bemusedly noted that companies will probably spend "billions of dollars trying to figure out why workers felt more engaged during a pandemic than they do today" despite how truly simple it is.
"People don't feel like their organizations care about them as individuals," she said, reading from Gallup's own data. "Now, what were people allowed to do in 2020 that they're not allowed to do today? Oh, right. They were working from home."
Being sent home for months, if not years, was of course in part a bid to keep corporate workers and their families safe — a level of investment in employees' well-being that now seems as if it must have been a dream by comparison to today.
Photo: Dean Drobot / Shutterstock
But Dilber put an even finer point on it: Not only have companies made clear they no longer care, they are now actively endeavoring to make their employees' lives not just harder, but more expensive. And it's happening at a time when inflation has made everything else more expensive, too.
"The weird upside of the pandemic is [that] so many people … got to really understand and experience what it's like when work integrates into your life instead of the other way around," Dilber said.
But now, professionals all over the country have gotten "dragged back into offices and everything started getting more expensive, and commuting to work was more expensive, but nobody increased their salaries" meaning they're "working a lot more and harder for less money."
So the problem actually has a very simple fix: Rather than spend money on office space and consultants to tell them how to fix employee disengagement, companies should simply let workers continue working from home and pay them fairly instead. "Like, literally, this is so easy that it concerns me that executives can't figure it out," Dilber quipped.
Instead, many business leaders seem dead-set on listening not to the decades of data showing working from home boosts productivity and saves money, but rather to the recent tiny handful of biased studies, many of them funded by commercial real estate interests, that say the opposite. Good luck with that.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.