How worker engagement levels affect Michigan businesses
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Employee engagement nationwide is stagnating after it saw a peak during the pandemic followed by a drop, a recent Gallup study found.
About a third of employees were engaged in 2023, the study, published on Jan. 23, found.
Gallup has been tracking employee engagement levels since 2000. In 2023, it surveyed a random sampling of around 18,600 to 19,800 each quarter, giving them a 95% confidence level. It found that following a decade of steady growth, there was a peak of employee engagement in June of 2020, with 40% of employees actively engaged. After that peak, the number started to decline, hitting a 32% low in 2022.
Meanwhile, the percentage of employees who are actively disengaged declined to 16% last year.
“This disengagement has been consistent through time,” economic expert Paul Isely, an associate dean at the Grand Valley State University Seidman College of Business, told News 8. “Realistically, somewhere between 10 and 20% of workers have been disengaged.”
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That figure has been growing since the end of the pandemic up until the decline in 2023, he explained.
“That change is very interesting and is consistent with some of the things we’re seeing as we look at businesses out there,” he said.
Extrapolating from Gallup’s data, he said around 660,000 workers in Michigan are disengaged at their jobs.
“That’s a lot of people who are less productive and they’re generating work for the people around them,” he said. “Managers now have to manage that issue as well.”
Employees who are either not engaged or are actively disengaged leads to around $1.9 trillion in lost productivity nationally, Gallup says.
Employers are having a harder time convincing workers to do things like take more overtime or work in less flexible workplaces, while workers want to “sculpt” their workplace into something that fits them, Isely said, explaining that that leads to more turnover or workers pulling back.
One of the most important aspects of engagement is understanding what is expected and what a role entails, Gallup says. The level of expectation understanding is especially low in roles that are hybrid or fully remote.
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Since 2020, remote workers saw a 12-point drop in an understanding of their expectations (to 47%), while hybrid workers saw a 13-point decline (to 41%). On-site workers in remote-possible jobs saw only a 6-point drop (to 43%).
But managers are figuring out how to work in a hybrid workplace, Isely said, which could be why there was a drop in active disengagement.
“It’s taken a lot of learning, a lot of training, a lot of thinking about it for management groups to understand, ‘How do we make our workforce mesh together if they aren’t all in the same room together?'” he said.
WHAT BUSINESSES CAN DO
There are several things businesses can do to address disengagement. First, Isely said employers can find ways to meet the needs of workers, like child care.
In Michigan, around 4% of workers who are not in the workforce cite child care for the reason. There’s an even bigger group of people who are still in the workforce but are still facing that issue.
A study released in 2023 from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and its partners found that lack of child care options leads to $2.88 billion in economic loss each year. Employers like Gentex have answered the need by building an on-site child care and preschool facility.
Overall, employers can look for ways to offer employees more flexibility when it comes to things like time, location and variety of work, Isely said.
For younger people especially, he said it’s important to help workers connect what they’re doing to how it helps the greater good.
“Sometimes that’s hard to see when you’re lower down in a firm or a business or doing a job that’s disconnected from maybe the environment or from the societal issues that you’re worried about,” Isely said. “But every single one of these jobs has that type of impact and we have to help people understand.”
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Gallup found that one of the most important thing businesses can do is have leadership have “one meaningful conversation per week” with workers about things like expectations.
The study also says “the role of manager has never been more challenging.”
“This is also a two-way street,” Isely said. “Workers being disengaged isn’t just the fault of the individual workers, it’s also the fault of management. So we know that workers leave because of bad managers, and having good education and good training for your management group helps alleviate these problems.”
THE YOUNG WORKER AND ‘QUIET QUITTING’
The amount of young people who are engaged at work is increasing, rising two points in the past year amid workers younger than 35, Gallup found, though it still hasn’t reached the 40% 2020 peak.
Isely said that’s happening out of necessity, as the younger workforce is under more economic stress.
“We’ve actually seen a substantial increase in the engagement of some of these young workers,” he said.
It still hasn’t reached the same level as their Gen X and Baby Boomer predecessors, but Isely explained that could just be because those generations “were taught not to complain about work.”
“You never know whether the survey is showing a real difference or whether it’s showing the way people want to be perceived,” he said.
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There may be a similar explanation for the 50% of the workforce that is ‘quiet quitting’: sticking to their job description but never going beyond that. Isely said while some may contribute that to a shift from “living to work” to “work to live,” he believes it’s mostly about how people are talking about work.
“Most people go to work because they’re need to earn a living,” he said. “That hasn’t changed a lot through time. … What is different is the younger generation feels empowered to express that.”
He also sees young people being more willing to avoid advancement in the workplace, if they think they can survive on their current wage.
“That’s an interesting set of choices,” he said. “What we’ve been watching a little bit is, how did those choices change as that millennial group now gets to the point where they have kids?”
People are having children later in life, he said, and typically children make adults willing to work more.
“That drop in total number of kids, that drop in individuals who have kids provides them a little freedom to say, ‘I don’t need as much money to make sure that my family is OK, because I’m taking care of myself,'” he said.
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