Notwithstanding all of the attendant biases at play when people perceive their own productivity and the productivity of others, I think the more interesting angle is how we perceive work more generally. We’re missing something important.
There’s a tendency among policy and business leaders to assume workplace trends are entirely characterized by and specific to offices, whether those are the company’s own premises or an office in the home of an employee. That tendency was on full show during the pandemic and it’s on full display here. Discussions around remote working, productivity and well-being almost exclusively converge around the needs of office workers and the owners of the offices they’ve vacated.
Setting aside the various barriers to productivity presented by working in an office or doing an office job remotely, one of the biggest drivers of productivity is engagement. And engagement is low across the board, office or no office.
I was traveling by train in the UK recently and had an illuminating chat with the conductor. He was explaining to me why services were so disrupted — or so much more disrupted than usual — with cancellations and delays causing issues around the UK. Rail staff is simply not taking overtime. The rail system in Britain relies on workers doing overtime. But at the moment, many workers are doing their contracted hours and not a minute more. They’re ‘quiet quitting.’ Consumers are paying the price for this and pressure is mounting on train operators to fix the problem. When done en masse, ‘quiet quitting’ can almost pass for informal industrial action.
Vox’s Emily Stewart reported on a similar problem in Polk County, Florida, where there’s an overtime issue affecting fire and rescue services. The difference here is that local firefighters are obliged to do overtime and many value the extra pay. But due to staffing issues, those who want to limit the amount of overtime they do to the contractual minimum are feeling pressure to take on significantly more than they can handle. This is causing issues with morale and staff are leaving. This is not a productivity issue; it’s an engagement issue.
According to Dr. Emma Soame, assistant professor of management at the London School of Economics, engagement is based on quite a simple formula; one-third of it is informed by the perceived meaning of the work, one-third on perceptions of management and one-third on a worker’s ability to communicate with management.
This formula is instructive as it illustrates a potential path to reconciliation between disengaged workers and the organizations they work for. Most people can tell if their work is meaningful. And most of us have had jobs that lacked meaning beyond providing a salary. And in any case, it’s unlikely that firefighters of Polk County are unable to see the meaning in their work. Yet they’re disengaged. So for those with jobs where the meaning isn’t as clear cut as “I rescue people from fires,” it’s really about parts two and three; perceptions of management and our ability to communicate with them.
Are managers doing enough to improve how they’re perceived? Dominic Ashley-Timms, CEO of UK management consultancy Notion and co-author of the forthcoming book ‘The Answer is a Question…’ told International Business Times that organizations are overlooking people’s existential concerns, like the pandemic, the war in Ukraine or the impending cost-of-living crisis. “As a result,” he says “a lot of people are questioning the work they do and how they’re spending their time. It’s not the great resignation, it’s the great realignment.”
The inescapable fact is that everything is relative. Work can be meaningful, but if you have an impending sense that things aren’t right with the world, the meaning diminishes. Treating low engagement as a work culture issue does it a disservice. Yes, it’s hard to care about whether people we don’t know are engaged with their work. But when frontline services start to become affected by a ‘phone it in’ culture, standards of living drop. Low morale at train companies in the UK is affecting people’s ability to travel and, in Polk County, Florida, it’s affecting their ability to get help in an emergency.
If global engagement trends continue as they are, ‘phoning it in’ will become the norm for all but the most ambitious or focused workers, and that’s bad for everyone. Work has to be meaningful and engaged. John Ruskin, the British social reformer, said at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in 1851: “In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it, they must not do too much of it, and they must have a sense of success in it.”
