Prolonged recession taking its toll on US engagement

After a year of upward trending engagement scores, a new study on employee engagement in the US workforce shows a precipitous decline in workers’ psychological investment in their organisations

While the economic recession may have temporarily motivated employees to put forth extra effort on the job, the latest data from this scientific study suggests US workers may have hit their breaking point, as all five components of Modern Survey’s Employee Engagement Index are now trending downward.

Modern Survey began tracking the engagement of the US workforce using nationwide samples of U.S. workers in August 2007, before the recession started. In August 2008, when the economic crisis was well underway, clear drops in all five components of Modern Survey’s Employee Engagement Index were recorded.

Employee engagement then rallied from August 2008 to August 2009, eclipsing pre-recession levels. Now, after a year of increasing employee effort, sacrifices to ensure employment and increased alignment with organisational goals, the trend has broken. The most significant declines are statistically significant six percentage point drops in the number of workers who say they “take pride in their company,” (from 79% in August 2009 to 73% in February 2010) and “intend to stay with their company for a long time” (from 63% in August 2009 to 57% in February 2010).

At a recent Modern Survey Executive Roundtable event, employee engagement experts and senior leaders in Human Resources from some of the largest companies in the US weighed in on the findings. The group came to the consensus that the strain of the economic recession has likely left workers feeling depleted of energy.

Nancy Hanna, President of HR Executive Forum and Vice President of Chandler Group, worries that continuous pressure to do more with less is not only unsustainable, but it’s also unhealthy.

“We passed up the Japanese a couple years ago in general productivity and hours worked, and I remember they used to have a special word in Japanese for 'death by overwork' (Karoshi)…if you throw yourself against the wall, month after month, year after year, with no immediate end in sight, people are going to get sick.”

As organisations strive to combat this sense of fatigue in their workforce, paying attention to the key drivers of employee engagement may prove to be more important than ever. The results of this study should serve as a wake-up call to organisational leaders who may have been preoccupied with other matters in recent months, or who still do not fully grasp just how critical creating and sustaining high levels of employee engagement is to the performance, and even survival, of their business in the long run.