Worker Frustration Is On the Rise
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Here's your money briefing for Thursday, June 15th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Last year, we told you about quiet quitting, employees doing the bare minimum to get by. Fast forward and things haven't gotten much better.
That group is more resentful that their needs aren't being met. And in some cases, these workers are disgruntled over low pay and long hours or maybe they've lost trust in their employers.
We'll talk to WSJ Workplace reporter Lindsay Ellis about what's causing employee frustrations to boil over after the break.
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Half of workers surveyed in a new Gallup poll say they're not engaged on the job. A lot of them are unhappy and resentful that their needs aren't being met. Wall Street Journal workplace reporter Lindsay Ellis joins us to go deeper to understand why worker sentiment has gone south. So, Lindsay, first of all, how is worker engagement defined and why is it important?
What evidence shows worker frustration is rising and where does the data come from?
So employee engagement is a measure of how enthusiastic and involved you are at work. And it's an important thing to measure because it tends to correlate with a few things that employers really care about. how productive you are and how loyal you are to the company or organization. You know, it's also important because it gives some signal as to how happy someone might be at work, you know, whether the day-to-day is enjoyable or if it feels like you're sort of trudging uphill.
You know, it wasn't that long ago you were with us talking about quiet quitting, where workers were putting in minimal effort to get by. How is what's going on now different?
So just as last year, Gallup says that about half of U.S. workers are not engaged at work. So similar to quiet quitting, you know, people putting in minimal effort day to day to do their jobs and not go above and beyond. What's different now is that there's a growing share of the workforce that is disengaged. That group is more resentful that their needs aren't being met. And in some cases, These workers are disgruntled over low pay and long hours, or maybe they've lost trust in their employers. And so that proportion of the workforce is increasing as the sort of not engaged, quiet quitting shares is holding steady at about 50%.
But as recently as 2020, the Gallup poll showed that worker engagement levels had hit their highest levels ever. What pushed those levels so high?
In 2020, some of the engagement was really driven by companies' early responses to the pandemic. There were tons of town halls and meetings early on in which employees Executives and managers were really overly communicating with their workers, and that kept relationships strong, kept people on similar pages, and workers said that they were more engaged at that point.
But the poll says employee engagement has declined for two straight years. What are workers saying about that?
So some workers are saying that they are less connected to their offices and workplaces, which they attribute in part to remote work.
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