April 10, 2024

“Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy,” Or, Optimal Engagement in the Workplace

By: Joanie Weber

 

When I first heard Michael Stipe cry out that line from the R.E.M. song What’s the Frequency Kenneth? something about it stuck with me.  And it still resonates with me today. I was relatively new to the workforce, and that one line said a lot about what I saw every day in my workplace. I was surrounded by incredibly bright, capable people who, on the surface, seemed at best apathetic. Were they really apathetic, or were they just withdrawing in disgust from their work?

Trends in work

Today, social and news media bombard us with trends in the workplace. Things like quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays, or a change in our wages are everywhere in the media. All these viral concepts are tapping into that same zeitgeist that I saw in the early 90s. The bottom line is that most people in the workforce don’t love their work because it doesn’t seem like it’s helping to create a meaningful life for them. At the same time, a small percentage of the workforce feels highly connected to their work. The commonality among this small group is that they generally take an entrepreneurial outlook on their work and life. Why is that?

I think it’s because those with an entrepreneurial outlook have been able to find an overlap in their work. This is an overlap between their personal interests, their inherent capabilities, and how they can meet the needs of other people. Essentially, they are what I would call optimally engaged in their work. 

Image of three circles in a Venn Diagram showing optimal engagement for workers, with interests, abilities, and the needs of others as the three circles

Creating meaningful lives in and outside of work

But, it’s also because these people know how to balance their work with their personal lives. In doing so, they build a meaningful life outside of work as well. Those who can make all these pieces work together are the ones who don’t abide by quiet quitting and the other ways of acting out over frustration with how their lives are going. Over the last few years, the pandemic gave many people the opportunity to work from home for the first time. Through that experience, they saw how this mostly allows for a better work-life balance.

Even back in the 90s, when I was a junior organizational leader, I realized that top-down, command and control management skills meant relatively little compared to interpersonal leadership skills when it came to getting the highest performance out of my team. That’s why it amazed me when I saw this article. Did some of the most powerful CEOs in the world really think that the best way to improve performance and profitability was to force people back to five days in the office per week?

As that article mentions, senior leadership made these decisions to “reassert control over employees.” Nowhere on that Venn diagram does “being controlled by my boss” fit in as part of optimal engagement for employees. That’s why so many people are “withdrawing in disgust.” They had found a better work-life balance by working from home, but now they see the tide turning back to a corporate “command and control” mindset. 

What does the research say?

Not surprisingly, according to this research from the University of Pittsburgh, “80 percent of employers who hastily decided to bring their employees back to the office regretted their choices. Those companies that insisted on an early return to the office have reported low employee morale, a decline in their hiring rates, and a loss of top talent.” No-duh.

These CEOs could have benefitted from embracing entrepreneurial thinking in the workplace. Rather than making this poor choice, driven by a desire for control, they could have taken a more entrepreneurial approach to solving this problem. Just like I laid out in this previous blog, in dealing with a problem as complex as this, they needed to experiment with different options, get loads of input from all stakeholders involved (not just their senior leadership), and work methodically to a more systemic solution that meets both productivity goals and employee needs.

So, the next time you hear someone mention how lazy, unproductive, or apathetic their workers are, you might want to point out that maybe, just maybe, they need to reflect on their own leadership. Do they have the entrepreneurial leadership skills to thrive in today’s work environment, or are they still trying to enforce a strictly managerial approach?

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