Gallup released a survey showing in April showing employee engagement is at an 11-year low. The graph below is from their posting. Notice the peak in “% engaged” is 36% in January 2020. Right before COVID hit and lockdowns sent most of us out of the office.
But notice the “% Actively disengaged” blue line on the bottom of the graph. It started trending up in January 2019, well before COVID. So perhaps there’s something more going on than the obvious and we can’t blame it all on COVID.
The article talks about some companies that are doing well with 70% engaged employees and credit “inspiring workplace cultures they have built have been strategically planned and intentional.”
The increasing detachment is based upon “less role clarity, lower satisfaction with their organizations and less connection to their companies’ mission or purpose.” The trend started before COVID and COVID probably added fuel to the fire, but it didn’t cause the fire.
Companies that have inspiring cultures that employees can feel connection are likely to have more engaged employees and less disengaged employees. These are factors that can be strategically planned and intentionally controlled, which means engagement is not a lost cause – but if your employees are not engaged, it needs to be addressed.
(Oh, and in case this is interesting to your company, values and mission is one of the elements of culture that we measure at Culture Diagnostics!!)
