> because the highest quit rate is among not engaged and actively disengaged workers.
As opposed to what, exactly? What are you expecting to see? Highly engaged employees mass quitting? The situation described in this piece sounds fairly normal to me. People who aren't that fussed about their jobs, or actually dislike them, are always much more likely to quit.
The real question is whether there has been an increase in the percentage of employees who are not engaged or actively disengaged. The article might answer that question but I'm afraid I'd disengaged before I got to that point.
I have some highly engaged coworkers who are in the process of burning out. I think they’re only still here because the entire company would crumble if they stopped.
Coworkers have commented that if we lose these people we are fucked, and I just keep thinking: can’t you see that they are already gone? You better make plans, because as soon as they go I’m splitting too.
> I have some highly engaged coworkers who are in the process of burning out.
This is a real problem. I'm consistently encouraging my team to take time off as and when they need it, and to make sure they're only working their contracted hours: everyone running themselves into the ground is the last thing we need.
Also, if everyone's running on the red line the whole time you actually lose the ability to plan effectively because you have no idea what the world looks like when everyone is simply doing a "normal", healthy, sustainable workload.
I don’t know their situation, but it might be an illusion. Some people are great at making it seem like they’re doing a lot, when they actually just look very busy.
It’s more of a petard hoisting situation. Some people carved out an subject matter that could have been much smaller and now that some business conditions have changed, they have as much work to do as the next three groups combined. Those other groups, including mine, only have so much work because they’ve taken the message to delegate incorrectly, and instead of an orderly handoff starting three years ago, it’s now rushed because it’s load shedding.
Add to the middle of this that we have deals or licenses running out and have decided that on top of everything else we should save some money too. The opportunity costs are probably killing us. But to keep them from completely killing us, other people are still cranking out major features including architectural changes, so we have those disruptions hitting too. It’s chaos.
I think employees are more disengaged. This is anecdotal, but the pandemic and climate change have tainted my work with a certain hopelessness. It’s hard to listen to “best quarter yet!” CEO pep speeches and feel like enthusiastic about some new feature you code when existential threats seem close at hand. Combine that with economic policies that seem to create and obliterate fortunes with a hand wave, an increasing wealth gap, and an extremely inaccessible housing market, and it is hard to keep your your hopes up and your nose down.
I would argue that “not engaged” isn’t the worst thing in the world. The expectation that we devote our lives to work is one of the biggest things that dissolved during the pandemic. I am far less engaged at my job than I have been in years, which actually makes me better at it because I’m almost never stressed out anymore.
"Engaged" and "disengaged" are terms of art in management which refer to whether someone is totally checked out or not. Someone who spends most of the day on Facebook is "disengaged", even if they're very competent and get more done in an hour than their teammates do in eight. Someone who basically takes their job seriously and puts in a reasonable effort is "engaged", even if they're a total idiot with net negative productivity.
And they're apparently pretty approximate, if being 'disengaged' means that you're only 18% less productive than your 'engaged' coworkers. And then they provide the striking statistic that it will cost an employer up to 2X the annual salary of the 'disengaged' worker to replace them - that's equivalent to ten years of their not working hard, doesn't seem worth it, somehow.
Totally agree, the numbers in this article strike me as ranging from "suspect" to "bullshit". I should've clarified that I was defining how I and (I think) other real managers use those terms.
For example, my guess would be that the lost value from a disengaged employee is closer to 100% of their salary than 18%, because of how they drag the rest of the team down by generating bugs, derailing conversations, needing constant help to un-fuck their local env, etc.
As opposed to what, exactly? What are you expecting to see? Highly engaged employees mass quitting? The situation described in this piece sounds fairly normal to me. People who aren't that fussed about their jobs, or actually dislike them, are always much more likely to quit.
The real question is whether there has been an increase in the percentage of employees who are not engaged or actively disengaged. The article might answer that question but I'm afraid I'd disengaged before I got to that point.