U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low

Employers don't engage with employees, why should it go the other way?

Anecdote time:

My uncle went straight from school to work for the local factory. The factory gave him a low-cost loan the factory backed, he built a house with it. Paid the loan back in record time (because of the low interest). He did get laid off once and had to work in a factory one town over (same company still), but when the economy picked up he came back to the same factory.

He retired from there some years ago, ever had the one employer, but they took good care of him and he returned it with loyalty to the company.

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If companies were loyal to employees in ways other than just fancy words ("we are family here"), people would be more likely to be loyal to companies.

Now the only way to get a proper raise is to switch jobs. The best way to get a better salary/title at your current job is to leave to another company for a year or two or come back. New employees fresh out of school get paid same or better than people who have been there for a decade.

Why would anyone work hard in those situations?

Wait you're telling me that people don't care about their jobs as their realize how much their companies don't care about them? Service industry corporations making scheduling systems that make their employees lives unnecessarily hard and also providing no or limited benefits. Companies that could be remote forcing employees to RTO as a power play. CEOs proudly announcing that AI will let them stop hiring.

The social contract is entirely broken in the US. The law does not apply equally. The rigging is being exposed.

The amount of engagement and passion for work feels at an all time low based on the circles I move in in the UK.

Almost everyone I know has half an eye on the exit or they are making decisions like cutting back to one person businesses or taking big pay cuts for remote. Nobody seems hungry for promotions or more money. There’s so much apathy.

I’m guessing it’s partly post Covid but feels like something is fundamentally changing in our culture. Or it could be that me and my circle are our 40s now!

Well, this starts at the top.

Treat people with respect, pay them decently (it doesn’t need to be MANGA crazy), and promote good management.

We would probably be shocked at how engagement, morale, productivity, and deliverable Quality go up.

When the only carrot is money, you’re just going to get short-term mercenaries that don’t care about what they do, who they work for, who they work with, and bounce from job to job; doing terrible work (even if they are quite capable of doing good work).

I can only speak for myself of course, but from discussions with friends + co-workers I trust, I think there's subset of people working in software professions that are questioning the viability of these careers in the long run. Considering the now high level of difficultly of finding a new job, paired with the constant psychological warfare of every CEO boldly announcing that "Agents" are going to do all the programming work, plus the recent talks of off-shoring (not to mention seeing a majority of openings in other countries) are forcing the "hard conversations" to be had.

Can't imagine people are thrilled with their prospects.

So the campaign to terrorize everyone with upcoming AI-induced obsolescence, and the trillions of dollars spent to that aim, are working.

To expand on the headline: US employee engagement in 2024 was 31% which was tied with the lowest in the past decade (since 2014) but also higher than at any point in the preceding decade (2000 – 2013). Lowest engagement was 26% in 2000 and 2005. Peak engagement was 36% in 2020.

(Sample size was ~80,000 working adults. Sampling error was ±0.5 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.)

A guess: If you could ask a (nice) djinn to make rent-seeking businesses disappear - those with net negative real productivity -> happiness generation - society would bounce back.

That includes real estate / landlordism, sorry!

Many people aren't motivated by the absolute number in their bank account. But we're taking away their security in the form of precarious living situations, which is a universal need.

The cause of efficiency. The most efficient employee, in the eyes of companies, are those who do their job well, need little effort to maintain, and cheap. All of them resulting in minimum effort, minimum wage worker that just get the job done without additional effort.

And when companies can layoff employees easily and have no retirement / loyalty bonus program, it cements the minimum effort effect.

CEO outrage, politicians, corporations and the rich getting away with everything, hearing AI is being explored to replace you in the next few years, it's no wonder.

Would love to see these numbers for Europe.

Here is something I noticed in Germany:

It is surprisingly hard to go out for lunch or a coffee and get good service these days.

In many restaurants and cafés where you have been served by friendly people who were interested in what they sell and happy to see customers, you are now served by people who are completely out of touch with what they do. Disinterested, and sometimes even outright grumpy towards customers.

Time to break out the emergency pizza party!

But seriously, anyone below genX has not been in a situation where "caring" employers are the norm.

In the march for growth, one of the easier things to do is cut employee benefits. That can have a corrosive effect on culture. "The company is just about cheapest possible, why should I both putting the extra in"

Thats even before we get to profit sharing. Bonuses were a thing, and your manager's manager was only on maybe +50-70% of what you were on.

In short, if you want engagement, you're gonna need to invest in it. Evening out the wage bands, providing decent incentives, paying your staff to care and rooting out bad actors.

but culture change is hard.

we learned that the rat race is, in fact, a rat race; many of us are choosing to opt out via "quiet quitting" or never engaging in the first place.

Free time has more utility than money, after a point.

Engagement is a 2-way street.

Employers treat employees at best as disposable and replaceable. At worst employers are outright hostile to employees (RTO, layoffs, etc).

Yes, what you get in return is a disengaged, and sometimes adversarial workforce.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

Is this not to be expected? Peter Thiel with his famous "Competition is for loosers" has I think captured something essential about the Zeitgeist: if you are being set up to compete, then you are being set up to fail in a rigged game.

And come on it can't be that bad!

I have seen Larry's Musashi ship and Jeff's Koru, anyone who can afford a $500'000'000.- ticket for sailing the blue seas is sure to treat their employees well enough so that they can afford to take a break to pee and not have to use a plastic bottle, right?

It does makes sense as Jeff wrote his success was: “half luck, half good timing, and the rest brains!”

I feel like this is the dot.com bubble all over, but instead it's AI and WFH.

economic and real wars, climate change, dropping fertility, dropping engagement.

we need to get better

I think there's two main things at play that people don't usually mention. Many of the things commonly mentioned, I agree with: waking up to the "game", RTO, layoffs, wealth inequality, etc. But I also see people can get profound entertainment elsewhere. Tiktok, games, social media, etc. It used to be really hard to be social, you had to go somewhere, including work, to interact with people. Now, you can interact in myriad ways online. Yes, it is different, and there are downsides, but it is easy, which is a huge upside, and you can focus on exactly what you want. In the 90s if you were into some obscure hobby, your choices were extremely limited. Now you can get easy interaction with fans of the niche of the niche. Again, not without its downsides. Life used to be pretty boring, speaking as a guy in his 50s. The 1980s and 1990s were ok if you were into mainstream stuff, but you had to abide by the culture or be rejected. It was pretty boring, and now you can find so much interesting stuff it is awesome. But also a bit lonely at times. Still, not nearly as lonely as it used to be. Work was an outlet to be around people. Now I don't care that much about doing that. And it gave you something to do. Less so these days.

Second, things are really changing anymore. I think about the past 10 years and largely my life is almost identical, which is bizarre compared to the 4 decades before that. I look around my room (home office), and everything is a bit nicer, but we have LCD displays, and laptops, and webcams, and all this stuff around me that is just like what I used to have. Compare 2015 to 2005 and it is quite different. 2005 was all CRTs and desktop computers that were loud and slow. No social media, the Internet was useful but not omnipresent. Movie theaters and CDs and DVDs were everywhere. If you wanted to interact with people, you called them or got together. Very different life. 1995 was, of course, way different as well.

Now, the future seems done, in a way. And that bleeds into work, I don't hear about anyone really building anything new and exciting. Just things getting better and cheaper (except housing!). AI is a thing, but it is terrifying. Either it is a bubble and will smash the economy, or it will take over work and is terrifying, or it will go Terminator and is terrifying. Sure, there may be a more golden Culture-esque universe, and I'm hoping for that. Still, it doesn't feel like we as a people have much say in that, just some disgustingly rich asshats competing with each other for our future.

Maybe we can have Elon Musk come along and give the workers of America a pep talk.