Recruiting expert shares why employees are less engaged today compared to the 2000s and it's on point

Research has recently found people have been deeply disengaged from their work and companies have been losing a lot of money. Some might think that the pandemic might have led to this trend where most people were stuck at home trying to manage homes and work together. However, one would be shocked to know that it is the exact opposite and other factors are at play for this to happen at work. A new study by Gallup on US employee engagement reported that employees continued to feel more detached from their employers in 2023 compared to the 2000s. The employees have less expectations and lower satisfaction with their workplace, with less connection to its mission, states the report.

Moreover, the study says that the employees feel workplaces care less about them as a person. The report states that employee engagement stagnated for the second half of 2023 after it improved a bit in the first half. At midyear, 34% of US full and part-time employees were engaged in their work and workplace. For the full year of 2023, only 33% were engaged, which reflects a slight decline, mentions the study. The shocking part of the study is that employment engagement reached 40% when the pandemic hit, an all-time high compared to the 2000s. Tech recruiter Bonnie Dilber–who goes by @bonniedilber on TikTok–usually talks about everything related to careers and the workplace. She says in a video that companies will spend “billions of dollars” to figure out why workers felt more engaged during the pandemic than today.

"People don't feel like their organizations care about them as individuals," she said while analyzing the report. "Now, what were people allowed to do in 2020 that they are not allowed to do today? Oh, right. They were working from home." She further added, "The weird upside of the pandemic is that so many people began working from home that they really got to understand what’s it like when work gets integrated into your life instead of the other way around,” said the tech recruiter. She goes on to say that the companies have not only made their employees' lives harder with less pay but more expensive. Employees have been “dragged backed into offices and everything started getting more expensive and commuting to work was more expensive, but nobody increased their salaries,” shares the expert.

“Companies are like why aren’t we happy, why are we less productive but headlines like these can be really impactful because one of the reasons the companies are supposedly dragging people back into offices because they think they are going to be more productive,” explains Dilber. She says that it proves that the opposite is true and companies are losing money because employees are unhappy and “miserable.”

According to her, there is an easy fix to this problem and that is to allow people to work at their ease. She says that instead of spending money on rent, companies should let people work from the comfort of their homes and pay them fairly. "Like, literally, this is so easy that it concerns me that executives can't figure it out," Dilber says.