The Latest Employee Engagement Numbers are in … and They’re Not Very Pretty

YOU DON’T HEAR all that much about employee engagement anymore.

It’s still an important metric for organizations to get a fix on the state of their workforce, but after years of debate and lots of money spent on how to improve engagement, it seems to be another thing that slipped away after the pandemic-driven lockdown.

Nobody measures engagement better than Gallup, and just last week, their latest employee engagement report came out.

It was not very pretty.

Here is Gallup’s overview:

“In 2023, employees in the U.S. continued to feel more detached from their employers, with less clear expectations, lower levels of satisfaction with their organization, and less connection to its mission or purpose, than they did four years ago. They are also less likely to feel someone at work cares about them as a person.

These are among the findings of Gallup’s most recent survey of U.S. employee engagement, which stagnated for the second half of 2023 following a slight improvement earlier in the year.”

Engagement is still near all-time lows

HERE ARE THE NUMBERS Gallup bases the assessment on:

• At mid-year, 34% of U.S. full- and part-time employees were engaged in their work and workplace.
• For the full year of 2023, 33% were engaged, reflecting a slight recent decline.
• The final 2023 number lags behind the annual high — since Gallup began reporting U.S. employee engagement in 2000 — of 36% in 2020 and a peak of 40% in late June of the same year.
• The engagement peak in 2020 occurred after a decade of steady growth, followed by two years of decline, beginning in the second half of 2021 when it dropped to a 32% low in 2022.

Why are these engagement numbers important? Gallup explains them like this:

“Each percentage point gain or drop in engagement represents approximately 1.6 million full- or part-time employees in the U.S. Trends in employee engagement are significant because they are linked to many performance outcomes in organizations. Not engaged or actively disengaged employees account for approximately $1.9 trillion in lost productivity nationally.” (emphasis added)

There are a lot of other interesting things to dig into in Gallup’s latest update on employee engagement as well.

For example, Gallup’s research pins down the percentage of U.S. workers who are working outside of the office now that “the proportion of hybrid and fully remote workers has essentially stabilized … with 29% of employees with remote-ready jobs reporting they’re working fully remotely and 52% working a blend of in office and at home.”

Gallup also reports that “the percentage of actively disengaged workers has declined from 18% in 2022 to 16% in 2023,” and that “the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged workers in the U.S. is 2.1-to-1 in 2023, up from 1.8-to-1 in 2022. The record high is a ratio of 2.7-to-1, which was recorded in 2019.”

This is the kind of insightful data that Gallup is famous for, and there is a lot more in this latest report than I can possibly touch on here.

There’s just too much focus on engagement

BUT ONE MORE THING: I’ve written about employee engagement a lot over the years — and this is just a partial list — but I made the case here and on LinkedIn back in 2017 that It’s Time to Give Up the Ghost on Employee Engagement.

Here’s my argument:

“We’ve been focused way too much on employee engagement. Yes, it’s a good thing to have, but there’s been too much of a push for it at the expense of a lot of other things. …

It’s high time we gave up the ghost in this push to improve it and focus instead on building strong cultures and treating employees better.

Get that right and you won’t need to worry about engagement, because engagement will take care of itself.”

As much as I appreciate how well Gallup has tracked employee engagement data over the years, I still feel about it today the way I did when I wrote about it here in 2017.

So yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — it’s well past time to give up the ghost on employee engagement.

Other trends and insights … 

And if you need your weekly fix of AI news … 

• New York City Passed an AI Hiring Law. So Far, Few Companies Are Following It (From WSJ.com)
• Will AI Take Your Job? Maybe Not Just Yet, One Study Says (From Time.com)
• 6 Ways AI Could Disrupt Your Business (From HBR.org)
• Did ChatGPT Kill Recruiting Technology Innovation? (From ERE.net)
• Workers sound the alarm on AI workplace readiness (From WSU Insider)

One more thing … Can states legislate for more “career progession?” Not if they do it like this

I LOVE FINDING great workplace and managerial advice in unexpected places.

Here’s one from a newsletter over at Salary.com written by Heather Bussing. She’s a sharp attorney and sometime photographer who I used to chat with in the press room at various HR and talent conferences.

Although the title/headline is confusing and not terribly exciting — What Is Notice of Career Progression in CO’s Pay Transparency Law? — the Editor’s Note by Heather makes up for that. It’s a great read that cuts to the heart of the issue, and the tenor and tone of her lead paragraph gets right to it:

“Who comes up with this stuff? You have to wonder if legislators have ever worked as employees in large organizations that are trying to make money instead of rules.”

I taught opinion writing to college students for 13 years, and that’s a lead I would have loved to share as an example of how to grab readers, pull them in, and make them want more.

How can employers comply with this law?

WELL, I WANT MORE TOO, and here’s what Heather wrote next:

“My latest head scratcher is Colorado’s requirement that employers give current employees notice of ‘career progression.’ This is on top of giving employees notice of job openings. The idea is to inform people when they start what usually happens next on the career path from this role.

What if nothing happens? Does the employer have to state: this role is a career cul-de-sac? And what if there are multiple possible paths, including sideways or to completely different departments or locations?”

These are all great questions, and they certainly let you know where Heather is going with this.

Overall, it’s an Editor’s Note that goes on for 10 paragraphs and punches big holes in a new Colorado law that doesn’t give employers a clue about how they can actually comply with something that is a perfect example of legislative gobbledygook.

You need to read this Editor’s Note in its entirety to get the full impact, it’s not often that I find something like this that makes a case for why legislators need to focus on passing laws that are clear, concise, and can be easily understood by the average person.

Heather closes with this:

“Even after reading the guidance on Colorado’s pay transparency law on giving career progression notices, I don’t know how organizations can comply with this law without a ton of work that may not even be useful to the people the law is trying to help.

In the meantime, this is a nice summary of both the new Colorado and Hawaii pay transparency laws and who they apply to. Maybe these folks know.”

A terribly confusing workplace law

HERE’S MY TAKE: Maybe these folks DO know, but maybe they don’t. I’m betting that a great many Colorado legislators are, in general, as mediocre/incompetent as a great many legislators everywhere else.

I wrote about this back in 2018 in Surfing as Our “Official” State Sport: Is That What We Send People to Sacramento For?, and I repeat now what I wrote then:

“It’s too bad we’re all so numbed by all the crap coming out of Sacramento that we don’t demand  what’s left of our media ask why legislators spend time on stuff like this instead of focusing on fixing our failing infrastructure, or our terrible roads, or properly funding the California State University, or a hundred other REAL issues.”

I can’t speak to how the Colorado Legislature operates, but given how Heather Bussing takes the “Notice of Career Progression” in Colorado’s Pay Transparency Law apart, they seem to work in the same manner as their counterparts in my common sense-challenged state of California.

Make of that what you will, but just remember that a sharp attorney by the name of Heather Bussing tried to warn you about how terribly bad this confusing Colorado workplace law is.

Readers: I’ve written a version of this weekly wrap-up for more than 20 years — from Workforce.com to TLNT.com to Fuel50 to now here. Let me know what you think at johnhollon@yahoo.com.