Employee Engagement And Office Presence Aren't the SameEmployee Engagement And Office Presence Aren't the Same

We all know correlation is not the same as causation. However, it's not hard to see the results from Gallup's most recent workplace engagement report and wonder if that's the direct result of three years of uncertainty around what the "new normal is." Gallup reports:

For the full year of 2023, 33% were engaged. This figure 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 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.

According to Gallup, this disengagement starts with disconnection. Workers lack clarity around their roles and a strong connection to their companies. This sense of disconnect is stronger among hybrid and remote workers.

It would be easy to say that the solution to the dipping engagement is simply to require everyone to come back to the office. Workers will feel more clarity and connection when they're in the same room as everyone, right? Wrong. New research from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that return-to-office mandates have no effect on a company's bottom line -- but can negatively impact company morale:

“We will not get back to the time when as many people will be happy working from the office the way they were before the pandemic,” said Mark Ma, co-author of the study and associate professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business. Additionally, mandates make workers less happy, therefore less productive and more likely to look for a new job, he said.

Tech companies have tackled the worker engagement problem with employee experience and employee engagement platforms, and as we've reported on WorkSpace Connect, companies that have employee experience platforms are both more financially sound and report higher levels of engagement than the companies that do not.

However, the key is not the technology -- it's good managerial practices. The technology only extends good employee engagement practices like building a shared sense of mission, rewarding skills development and demonstrating flexibility so workers can still feel seen as people. Unless and until workplaces actually demonstrate that they can see their employees as human and address human concerns, employee engagement will continue to stall.