Gallup recently announced that two-thirds of the U.S. workforce is disengaged. This latest report reflects a general trend of declining worker engagement, despite an increase in the number of employers that are actively branding themselves as "mission" or "purpose" driven. That branding implicitly, and at times explicitly, suggests that profits alone are not the sole illuminating force of their business. Employee engagement is ultimately a measure of how connected one feels to their workplace, and how likely they are to go above and beyond to help the company achieve its goals and mission.
So it intuitively follows that being a purpose or mission driven organization should result in higher, not lower employee engagement. Why, then, does this disconnect persist (even though there are shining examples of high engagement in purpose driven companies)? One possible explanation is that branding alone is not enough to be an actual purpose driven organization. The cognitive dissonance between the words of a company and its actions has
A 2022 analysis from the
Read more:
To add insult to injury, there has been a series of high profile investors (
While it is easy to condemn these brash comments (and Home Depot's current leadership did rebuff Mr. Marcus' remarks), it would be naive to assume that these are truly isolated sentiments. Indeed, the above Gallup and "purpose-gap" results suggest that the sentiment of profit maximization above all other considerations is felt by the majority of workers, even if not explicitly stated by company leaders. The actions of many companies over the last 40 years, however, explicitly send the message that profit maximization is the primary goal and that statements of purpose and meaning are often correctly judged by a workforce as hollow and highly polished public relations statements.
Read more:
NYU Professor Scott Galloway's new book, Adrift: America in 100 Charts, contains a number of fascinating charts, but perhaps none more so than a chart showing the following: up through the 1970s productivity and wages went up together. But since then, and up until the present, productivity has taken off while wages have mostly stagnated. This untethering of productivity and wage growth has resulted in the economic gains of productivity largely accruing to a relatively small number of wealthy shareholders. In short, the rich have gotten richer (folks like Charlie Munger and Bernie Marcus) while the once burgeoning middle class has shrunk — all while being expected to work even harder for lower pay and to keep quiet while doing so.
Read more:
There is likely no magic solution to turning the employee engagement ship around. But what does seem true is that blaming workers for disengagement, for speaking up and pushing back against the status quo, for expressing a desire for a life that is not solely about building wealth for a small cadre of powerful people, is a losing strategy. What if we had workplaces where people made enough money to cover their living expenses, where they had dignity, predictability and flexibility in their work schedules so they can plan and manage their own life, access to affordable healthcare and ample short and long term savings (to say nothing of exciting developments in increasing the number of employees who share in the ownership of businesses they work at)? These are not pie-in-the-sky dreams, these are real things we can do. We just have to start by aligning our corporate rhetoric with action.
