Bob Goldman
Now is the winter of our detachment.
The fall, the spring and the summer, too.
According to a recent report from the Nosey Norberts at Gallup, “employees across America are feeling detached from their jobs.” Really, what choice do they have? It would be nice if everyone with a job they didn’t like would do the decent thing and resign on principle, but we do develop certain habits, like eating, that are hard to break. So, “after struggling to make the leap to a new employer in a cooling job market and an economy marred by inflation, they are left feeling stuck with their discontent.”
Detached employees are a big problem for businesses. Management initiatives fall by the wayside. Sales lag. Marketing sags. You could step in and remind your co-workers that by throwing off their apathy and reconnecting with shared business goals, they will generate better results and greater personal satisfaction for everyone. But why bother?
It would be easy to blame employees for their detachment, but the real cause of the problem lies with management.
In the good old days, bosses were the embodiment of detachment. They peacocked around, trying to look important and pretending to care. Today, with a challenging economy and increased competition, bosses have become involved and invested in the way their employees work. Unfortunately, their initiatives have not worked out.
The return-to-office movement is one highly visible example. Whether you stay at home resisting or decide to cave and come into the office, RTO has resulted in major RTA — return to alienation. If you go back, you have to detach to survive. If you stay home, you are definitely, definitionally detached. (“Fully remote workers are consistently less connected to their organization’s mission or purpose,” says Gallup. To which I say — duh!)
If the demands coming at you from management are not enough to detach you — and they are — increased demands from customers can also spoil your chi. Get this: “56 percent of employees report noticing changes in customer expectations since the pandemic,” Gallup has found, “with 71 percent of those employees attributing changes to higher expectations for a better digital experience.”
I can neither explain nor excuse these customer complaints. It used to be that people enjoyed spending a relaxing 30 to 90 minutes listening to peppy on-hold music. They took comfort from the electronic reminders that “this call is important to us.” And everyone loved the surprise when the music stopped and the call was disconnected.
Employees, too, share blame for the new detachment. No longer satisfied with a cheery “attaboy” to start the year and a honey-baked ham to end it, today’s employees expect both generous annual raises and lavish benefits. The opportunity to drive their boss’s new Rivian to the charging station during lunch hour is no longer enough to satisfy these insatiable ingrates.
Employees have also lost faith in their company’s performance management systems. Disconnected workers do not believe they will get credit for their hard work. Of course, this is 110 percent their fault. If they spent less time focused on their jobs and more time focused on kissing up to their managers, they would see immediate results. No manager remembers your all-nighters but stay an extra 15 minutes after 5 to compliment the boss on the inspirational force of their brilliance, and your rise in the company will be meteoric.
The Gallup report ends with recommendations for managers who want to reattach to the detached. The remedies include letting employees “know what is expected of them” and “connect individual contributions to mission and purpose.”
The problem with these recommendations is obvious: It requires your manager to talk to you.
Is there anything worse than listening to a manager “communicate an inspiring vision that people want to get behind”? I don’t think so. Add a coda in which your manager spells out “the connection between employees’ jobs and the mission or purpose of their organization,” and I suspect the next Gallup poll will report a large number of workers responding with an energetic “Yuck.”
The prospect of these conversations, repeated with sickening regularity through the year, should be more than enough for you to put aside your qualms, questions and objections. 2025 will be the year you enthusiastically reconnect with your work ethic. Seeing your enthusiasm, your manager will detach themselves, no longer worrying about what you do or don’t do and where you do or don’t do it.
Now, that is a situation to which you can definitely attach.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.
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