Employee engagement in the U.S. recently fell to its lowest level in a decade, with only 31% of employees reporting they are engaged and 17% describing themselves as actively disengaged. According to the latest Gallup’s annual workplace report, the numbers haven’t looked this bad since 2014.
Jenny Shiers, chief people officer at employee experience platform Unily, says disengagement often starts with something as ordinary as a notification ping. “We conducted some really interesting research that found half of all employees are distracted at least once every 30 minutes, and almost a third report being distracted at least once every 15 minutes by a workplace notification,” Shiers says. “Nearly 6 in 10 employees report that digital tools add to their workplace stress.”
Fragmentation is distracting
The biggest offenders, according to Unily’s research, are video conferencing systems, email platforms and instant messaging applications. But the problem isn’t any single tool; rather, it’s what happens when too many of them are nagging employees from different directions. “When communications are fragmented, notification noise from multiple systems builds to the point where employees feel overwhelmed,” Shiers says.
The volume, she told HR Executive, is what ultimately makes employees miss the communications that tie their work to the company’s mission. “Over time, that impacts both confidence and engagement.”
Macaire Montini, a strategic HR leader at HR platform HiBob, says the same fragmentation plays out differently in hybrid environments, where cultural disconnection can be harder to spot. Conversations, updates and decisions scatter across channels and time zones, which can be damaging.
“When companies are not consistent, you start to see it show up in employee experience,” says Montini. This manifests as “recognition getting missed, onboarding losing some informal learning, knowledge becoming siloed and people not always having the context they need to do their best work.”
Disconnected workflows often start with small frustrations in how work gets done day in and day out, Montini says. “Over time, those frustrations can build and start affecting how employees feel about their work and their connection to the organization.”
Shiers frames an engagement issue as an operations issue, citing Gallup research showing the global economy loses an estimated $10 trillion per year in lost productivity to widespread disengagement. “When people feel work is harder than it needs to be, it naturally impacts all areas of work, from operations and efficiencies to employee engagement and satisfaction.”
Read more: Tech issues interrupt most workers multiple times a day
The AI expectation gap
AI is adding another layer of complexity and both practitioners say the tech is influencing what employees want faster than organizations can meet their needs.
“AI is raising employee manager expectations around speed, access and personalization in how work gets done,” Montini says. But she adds that efficiency isn’t the whole story because trust, clarity and human connection don’t come packed into the technology. And when employees lack visibility into how AI is being used, she says hesitation replaces confidence.
For Shiers, the issues mount when orgs try to layer AI onto the fragmented systems. “Before this can happen, they need a trusted, tightly governed digital home for tools and information to live,” she says. “Once you have that, AI can be used to create the kind of deeply personalized, frictionless experiences that truly enable new speed across the workforce.”
Rethinking engagement data
Both practitioners push back on the idea that sentiment scores alone are sufficient, and they say that many orgs experience a measurement problem as much as a culture one. Surveys don’t capture how work actually feels day to day, says Montini. She points to patterns across feedback, retention, performance and employee sentiment as a more complete picture of where engagement is eroding and why.
Shiers agrees that “organizations also need to understand whether employees can work effectively, adapt to change, access information easily and navigate systems with confidence because those day-to-day experiences have a significant impact on engagement over time.”
So who’s really responsible when engagement falls? Both practitioners suggest this problem is larger than HR. “Engagement has become a shared responsibility across the business,” Shiers says. “HR plays an important role, but so does leadership, IT, communications and managers.”
Montini focuses specifically on the manager layer, arguing that proximity matters because managers interact with employees daily and have the greatest influence on whether people feel connected to their work. The problem is born when organizations keep assigning that responsibility to HR. “The employee experience is shaped throughout the business,” says Montini. “Not just with HR alone.”
Credit: Source link
