Disengagement at Work Is a Global Epidemic

Unfortunately, the Best Buy Blue Shirts I met during my mystery shopper experiment in 2012 are hardly alone. Most people around the world feel indifferent—at best—when it comes to the work they do or the company they work for. Their job does not energize them, and as a result, they are not driven to give their best efforts, energy, attention, or creativity. The ADP Research Institute set out to put an exact number on this global epidemic by surveying over 19,000 workers in 19 countries around the world. They found that only 16 percent of people are “fully engaged” at work. This means more than 8 out of 10 workers merely show up for work—a staggering number. Although levels of disengagement vary from country to country, this is clearly a worldwide phenomenon.¹

This is a tragedy of unfulfilled personal potential, for we spend a significant part of our lives at work. So much talent and drive are left untapped. Millions of people are denied the chance to be inspired at work, thrive, and be their very best.

This is also a tragedy of unfulfilled economic potential, for study after study confirms how engagement positively influences productivity, reduces employee turnover, increases customer satisfaction and profitability, and even reduces workplace injuries. This disengagement epidemic has been estimated to cost a hefty $7 trillion in lost productivity.² Like the Best Buy employees I met at the Edina store, most people clock up for work and get by, dispensing only a fraction of their energy, creativity, brain power, and emotions.

I know the feeling. When I was a teenager, I got a summer job as an assistant mechanic in the body shop of a BMW dealership in my hometown in France. My mechanical skills are limited at best, and I had no interest or real skill for the job. I just needed to make some money. The days were long and dull. I was unable—and to be honest, probably unwilling—to do anything useful at the body shop. The highlight of my day was to take the garbage out, because I could step away from the shop and take more time than necessary to go back. I was a slacker, hiding from work.

After a couple of weeks, I got fired—an inauspicious start to my working life.

The following summer was hardly better. By then, I needed a new bike. And to buy a new bike, I needed money. Work, once again, was a means to an end. A necessary evil. I worked in a grocery store not far from home. All day long, I stuck price tags on vegetable cans for minimum wage. One by one, I took cans out of boxes and hit each one with my tag gun before placing it on the shelf next to the previous one. Again. And again. And again. Green beans. Corn. Tomatoes. I felt every minute of every hour stretch to a standstill. I had no contact with customers, who floated along the self-service aisles. My only human interactions were with colleagues doing similar mindless tasks, and they were just as miserable and withdrawn as I was. There was no coaching of any kind—in any case, I hardly ever saw any manager, let alone talked to one. There was no soul. My only purpose was to earn a few hundred French francs so I could buy myself that new bike and get out the door as fast as I could.

Then I got lucky: I was hit by a truck. I was bringing boxes to be compacted at the back of the store when a fighter jet flew over. A forklift driver got distracted and backed up straight into me. A bruised tailbone got me paid sick leave until the end of the summer, and I eventually got my bike by staying at home doing nothing. Goodbye canned vegetables! I was very happy.

To this day, I recall thinking while I was laid up that I would one day get to manage people. And I pledged to myself that, when that time came, I would remember what it felt like to work a job like this. The emptiness and the sense of disconnection. The indifference toward the company and whether it did well. The meaningless, mind-numbing tasks. Being so disengaged that I would take extra time to empty the trash or relish getting hit by a forklift because it meant getting away from work. I also promised myself that I would then do everything I could so that people who did work such frontline jobs would not feel the same way.

Imagine what would become possible if, instead of less than 20 percent, more than 80 percent of people gave their very best. Business units that top engagement charts are 17 percent more productive and 21 percent more profitable that those that languish at the bottom.³ Multiple studies have confirmed that more engaged, happier employees directly reflect on the bottom line and on stock price.^4,5

Besides being more productive and treating customers, colleagues, and suppliers better, people who report being fully engaged at work are also 12 times less likely to quit their jobs.⁶ This is true across industries and roles.⁷ Employees fired up about work are also 25 to 50 percent less likely to get injured.⁸

If so much good comes from engagement, what explains the global disengagement? It starts with how we view work itself.

Work as a Burden

Traditionally, work is viewed as a chore, a curse, or a punishment even. At best, work is a means to an end—something you do so that you can do something else. You make some money so you can pay the bills, go on holidays, and retire.

When I was president of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) France, I experienced the practical consequences of this perspective. The company was in charge of the technology systems for the 1998 soccer World Cup in France, from ticketing and badges to TV broadcasting and security. We had a team of 80 working on the project. Everyone on that team was fired up, keen to make sure that billions of people would get to enjoy the World Cup in person and on TV. It was a big project: a year before the actual World Cup, we tested our system during a smaller soccer tournament, also hosted in France. Knowing it was a dry run for the big tournament the following year, our team of systems engineers worked 51 hours that week to get it right. In France, however, 51 hours is over the legal limit of weekly work hours. Even if it is just one week, even when it comes to soccer—it is illegal. These laws were meant to protect against overwork in a more industrial age when work was more physically taxing, but the laws remain because work is still viewed as difficult and painful—a burden. As the president of the company, I was personally responsible, and I had to pay a fine.

The concept of work as a curse dates as far back as Greek antiquity, goes all the way to the Industrial Revolution and still impacts how society tends to think and feel about work today. It may have started with Zeus punishing Sisyphus to an eternity of pointless labor, pushing a large boulder up a steep hill just to watch it roll back down. Ancient Greeks viewed work as demeaning, getting in the way of the ideal of a life dedicated to contemplation and the acquisition of knowledge.⁹ Romans took a similar view.¹⁰ And the French word for work—travail—comes from a Latin word for a torture device.

Christianity’s view of work is not any rosier. Exile from Eden and a life of hard labor were Adam’s curse for disobeying God’s order not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.¹¹ And Eve? She was punished as well, but to painful childbirth—or labor.

The Industrial Revolution brought a new way of working—and new forms of hardship. Work was long, tough, and painful. Think of coal miners working backbreaking shifts, breathing coal dust, and risking explosions. Or textile workers losing fingers in mechanical weaving machines. People worked 14 to 16 hours a day, six days a week, for little pay and no time off. They died young. Although economist Adam Smith viewed labor as the ultimate source of economic wealth for nations, his conclusions on what that meant for the working man (Adam Smith did not seem to think much of working women) were pretty dismal, leading to “the torpor of his mind.”¹² In short, work was good for the collective, but terrible for individuals.

Then Frederick Taylor, a young foreman in a steel company, set out to discover, by observing how steel plates were being made, how workers could produce armored steel faster. While more efficient, industrial work became a mind-numbing affair, and workers were reduced to being faceless parts of an all-consuming machine.

This is the vision of industrial work depicted in Charlie Chaplin’s 1933 Modern Times, in which his character starts off working on an assembly line, screwing nuts faster and faster—until he breaks down and gets swallowed in the cogs of a giant machine. Taylor himself realized that workers performing repetitive tasks were unmotivated and disengaged, doing as little work as they could get away with. And of course, Karl Marx felt that when individuals are denied control over what they produce and how they produce it, they become alienated from their essential human nature.

Objectively, it is easy to see why work has not been viewed as a good thing.¹³ In this commonly held view, work is something one does to support one’s real life, which occurs when the workday or workweek is over. Not much fun!

A New World—and a Persistent Problem

Now our economic environment—and therefore the nature of work—is going through a radical transformation across the world. Call it a fourth revolution or, like General Stanley McChrystal, a VUCA world: volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous.¹⁴ Because of fast-changing technology and evolving social norms, agility, innovation, collaboration, and speed have become more valuable than standardized processes and long-term planning.

As a result, the nature of work has changed. The health-damaging physical strain, the Charlie Chaplin kind of mind-numbing repetition, the forklifts running over you, all are declining, as routine tasks get automated. Take my old supermarket summer job. It is being replaced by electronic shelf labels, which get updated at the flick of a finger on a central computer. Even in manufacturing, farming, and other traditionally strenuous occupations, work is becoming less physically demanding. Economies increasingly tilt toward services and more creative work. Two-thirds of all jobs in the US economy now require post-secondary education—up from just 28 percent in 1973—with leadership, communications, and analysis the most valued competencies.¹⁵

Yet although the nature of work has evolved rapidly, our view of work remains stubbornly unchanged. It is still often considered, if not strictly a curse, then a necessary evil. To some extent, what you do during your workday influences how you feel about work: I felt far more engaged later in my career than when I was sticking price tags on vegetable cans. Senior executives and other knowledge-based professionals report being more engaged than, say, assembly-line workers. Yet the nature of the job itself does not influence how invested people feel in their work as much as one might expect. Less than a quarter of C-suite or VP-level executives are fully engaged in the work they do—not vastly different from other jobs. And there is very little difference across generations: Millennials are not significantly more or less engaged than baby boomers.¹⁶ This leaves enormous room for improvement at all levels, and I believe that people can be invested in their work across all types of jobs.

In 2019, I was invited to speak at a G100 Network meeting of senior executives. During the event, one participant shared with me how shopping at Best Buy used to leave him utterly frustrated. His experience mirrored my own mystery shopper adventure back in 2012. But then he told me how shocked he had been after a recent trip to a Best Buy store: he had found Blue Shirts genuinely interested in figuring out how to best help him and in providing a great service and experience.

How had we pulled this off? he wanted to know. Had Best Buy changed the entire sales force? Recruited new types of people with a customer service gene? Or concocted a better system of incentives perhaps?

My answers to him were simple: no, no, and no. There had been no forced exodus of store associates, and we had not uncovered any miraculous incentive formula. Natural turnover excepted, these were the same people.

What we did to change his and every other customer’s shopping experience was unleash the enormous potential that lies dormant when people merely show up for work or are actively hating their jobs. What we did is turn a large number of disengaged people into engaged employees, inspired to care for their customers.

How?

This is what the rest of this book is about. And it all starts with how we each see work, as well as the human beings doing the work.

Questions to Reflect On