Chicago Booth Review Podcast Why Are Workers So Disengaged?

Ayelet Fishbach: In my class, when I teach MBA students, I ask them, what’s the main reason to work? It used to be that very few people raise their hand, that they go to work just to make a living. It was almost not socially desirable to say, this is why I go to work. When I taught last spring, it was half of the class. I felt sad.

Hal Weitzman: Most workers in the US say they’re feeling angry, anxious, and disengaged from their jobs. Why is that, and what can be done? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I’m Hal Weitzman.

Today I’m speaking with one of the world’s leading researchers on motivation, Chicago Booth’s, Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science, an author of the book, Get It Done, Surprising Lessons From the Science of Motivation. For Fishbach, we are living through a crisis of motivation and its roots lie in how we work and how we think about work. The motivation crisis has consequences for both employees and employers. Poor retention rates mean that companies are spending more than ever before on hiring and training, while workers are feeling unhappy, losing the opportunity to build social capital, and missing out on what used to be considered normal career development and growth. So, how can we get ourselves and our teams excited about work again?

Ayelet Fishbach, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Ayelet Fishbach: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Hal Weitzman: Now listen, this crisis of motivation that you and I have talked about, tell us first of all, let’s look at the data. What are the data telling us about how motivated people are, how they feel about their work?

Ayelet Fishbach: Well, you just said it. There is a crisis of motivation at work. The data suggests that there is an increase in feeling angry at work, basically all over the world. More people answer yes when they are being asked whether you felt angry today at work. There is an increase in anxiety, more people report that they felt anxious at work. Then when people are asked about the motivation and how much they’re engaged at work, well, it wasn’t great a few years ago.

Hal Weitzman: During the pandemic, right.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah, through the pandemic, we saw the people were already disengaged, but that has increased. We now have more than two-third of the employees in national surveys, in international surveys all over the world say that they feel disengaged at work.

Hal Weitzman: So what were the numbers telling us before the pandemic?

Ayelet Fishbach: Before it was hovering around two-thirds. That is a third say that they’re engaged and then you have maybe 20% say that they are disengaged and the rest not quite engaged, but also not extremely disengaged. That has increased. So if we had about a third or more that we’re engaged, this is now significantly lower. It is less than a third. It also, it worrisome because we see that people want to switch jobs more than ever. More than half of the employees in the US are looking for a new job, which means that we live at a time where no one expects their employees to stay there for a long time. There is a record high investment in HR and training and constantly bringing new people because your old people have left. From the employee’s perspective, there is this search for something that at this point many people say they cannot find.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, like you say, I mean this must be a massive cost to business and also a drag on growth because people are not motivated. They’re not presumably giving their full... Bringing their performance that they could be. So I’m guessing that that affects profitability of companies, the effectiveness of organizations. I mean, this must have a huge societal effect on top of the psychological effect where people are actually unhappy, which is also not good.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah, there was great data that is not recent, it’s from a few years back, showing that teachers who reported they are disengaged take more sick days every year. So it’s possible that being disengaged causes you to be sick, it’s also possible that their threshold for saying I sick and I need to stay home is lower. But yeah, this is a huge economic cost.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, and so in the sense it’s a crisis, is this a chronic crisis that’s getting worse slowly or have we reached an acute state where something needs to be done about it?

Ayelet Fishbach: Something needs to be done, whether we can reverse it and how quickly and where the world is going, well, I-

Hal Weitzman: Well we’ll come to that, but I want to ask you first. Maybe we should think of about what’s causing it. Well, what are your explanations of why we are in this crisis of motivation?

Ayelet Fishbach: Probably remote work is large part of the problem, and this is where I say probably because the data is something that we still collect. We are not sure, but it seems that work is now less engaging, and let me explain what I mean by that. We think about work as providing three sources of value, of satisfaction. One is money, we go to work because they need to make a living. Another one is personal growth, we go to work because we want to learn something interesting. We want to develop as a person, we want to do something meaningful for our company, for our society. The third is social connection. We go to work because we meet our friends there, because we bond with other people at work. We also bond with other people who are part of our profession outside of work hours. To a large extent, our social network is overlapping with the people that we work with.

When we moved to remote work, which has its own advantages, we saw that the social aspect was immediately lost. We could not do this on Zoom and I’m sure everybody remembers those. Basically experimenting, let’s have a happy hour on Zoom and everybody will bring their drink and we all sat there not know what to do with a drink or the Zoom or whatever. So, it’s really hard to connect with people not in person. We also see that for people who work from home, there are less opportunity to grow themselves. They’re less likely to hear about opportunities for promotions, for development, they’re less likely to be invited to develop themselves. So their work tends to be less interesting and does not provide social connection.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Does that mean, do we know if people are more motivated, do they tend to be those who are working more in person? Do we know that?

Ayelet Fishbach: We do know that. I hesitate because we collect data in there, what we call confounding variables. It is clearly the case that people that are called to the office tend to be the people that have more high power roles in the organization, they to begin with might have more interesting and more engaging jobs. But there is the process where people who are not there in person to begin with, we are less central for the organization and could become more marginalized as we see them less and less.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, what about the opposite, that people don’t like being told nowadays, that you must come in on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and they resent it, therefore they feel alienated and demotivated?

Ayelet Fishbach: That is the case as well. That as work shifts, expectations might not be aligned. What I expect for my employees might be different than what they expect. In a world of shifting expectations and shifting walls and instability, that’s cause of anxiety and this is what people tell us, that they feel anxious.

Hal Weitzman: All right. So we talked about remote work. What might be some of the other reasons for this crisis of motivation, do you think?

Ayelet Fishbach: Well, we do see that part of our current culture, and in particular we see this with Gen Z approach to work, is really just a place that affords everything else that I want to do in my life. So there is much less integration between work and life than what we see with millennials and previous generation. I can tell you that in my class when I teach MBA students, I ask them, what’s the main reason to work? I give them these three reasons that I mentioned. Do you go to work because you want to do something great, because you want to connect to other people, to society, because you want to make a living? I’ve been teaching this class for a while, it used to be that very few people raise their hand that they go to work just to make a living. It was almost like not socially desirable to say, this is why I go to work. When I taught last spring, it was half of the class. I felt sad.

Hal Weitzman: In other words, really the main thing they care about is the salary?

Ayelet Fishbach: Well, the main thing they care about is the salary because they don’t think anything else can happen because they gave up on the rest. Clearly, if you are only there for a year, then you’re not going to make deep, social connection.

Hal Weitzman: I mean, it’s disconnected to identity. You think back even to our parents’ generation, they were company people. You were a Ford guy or you were whatever, Abbott Labs guy, and that was where you saw your whole career. There was no need to move to another company. The company nurtured, you had a pension, you had a final salary program and you knew you were going to be there and they were going to take care of you and it was a community and you felt that was part of your identity. Then I guess for next generation, they thought themselves as a job, I am a whatever, I’m a researcher and that’s what I do and then I can jump around between institutions and maybe, I don’t know, maybe that sense of work as your identity has faded away as well and that identity is about something other than work.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yes, and you just said, so the social aspect was high for the generation of our parents. The self-fulfillment was high maybe for our generation. For young people, many young people, the focus is on income now. It’s always the case that all three are important and when we overgeneralize or stereotype, we always make mistakes. I have many young people around me that are very passionate and idealistic about what they’re going to do and make great social connections. So let’s not overgeneralize, while also highlight that the person that tells us the only reason to go to work is to make a living probably needs help in seeing that there is more to work, there is more to life.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, I wonder if it’s to do with expectations. A lot of people, particularly newer work, people who are newer on the job market, will have a sense that they must work from home. They won’t even bother applying for a job or pursuing a job unless they’re allowed to work from home. But then at the same time you’re saying the data suggests that they’re actually making themselves more anxious or more miserable and more alienated from the jobs that they’re doing.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yes, people want to work from home and some flexibility is probably ideal and probably going to stay with us. There was interesting data when you look at how the US built better highways, people change how far they are from work. Basically, it’s not that when a new highway was constructed that people had a shorter commute, their commute stayed just the same except they moved farther from work. So now that we are used to more flexible schedule, well, we might decide to live farther from our workplace and basically end up in the same situation that we were before when we need to spend a lot of time getting there and lose on productivity.

Saying that, yes, flexibility is nice. It’s nice that you can do some things at work, however, you are a human being, meaning you are in a social environment and you are a part of a social species. We don’t work well alone, we don’t do anything well alone. We are not built to do things in isolation, we suffer in isolation, isolation leads to depression. So yes, for flexibility, not for having a schedule where you never had to meet your fellow employees there. There was no social aspect for work.

Hal Weitzman: Ayelet, I’m sure what you’re saying is resonating with a lot of people, both employees and managers, and particularly I’m imagining with people who work in human resource departments. So let’s think about how we can make things a little bit better. What would you advise, let’s start with the managers and the HR department. What would you advise them to do to get people motivated and to end that alienation? You talk about people feel so separated from their work.

Ayelet Fishbach: Realize that people come to work because they want to do something meaningful with people that they appreciate. They want to learn from each other, they want to develop, they want to be with other people. They might not tell you that, they might tell you that the only thing that they care about is their paycheck. Well, don’t believe them, believe the psychology and help people realize that there is more that they can get from work, that there is more to get from spending time with these people and learning from them.

Hal Weitzman: But you’re talking about in-person there?

Ayelet Fishbach: I am still struggling to see how we can do this remotely, but I think realistically we are going to be in some sort of hybrid, most of us. We are going to see each other on sometimes and not others and that’s totally fine, that’s great. It’s wonderful that we can now stay at home when we have a sick child and still be able to work. I’m very happy about that personally, but I would say that as a manager, as a company, we need to realize that people need more than paycheck.

When we ask people what’s important for them versus others, they often make the mistake of not realizing that. So let me now explain how we run the study and I now, I’ve been running it with hundreds of people. I ask you how important is pay for you compared to the average person in the audience, whatever audience you are. Then I ask you, how important is doing something interesting or developing yourself for you, compared to the average person in the audience? People consistently are accurate when they say how important is pay for them compared with others, but misjudge how much others care about doing something interesting and growing themselves. So it seems that as managers, we tend to think that other people are here just for the pay. We need to get out of this mindset, we need to make work fun.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, and so then what about employees who find themselves who, as we said, argued, advocated for themselves to be remote and now they feel that they really are remote and they’re distant from what they’re doing and not enjoying it very much and feeling anxious?

Ayelet Fishbach: So now we collect the same kind of data with employees and we ask them to tell us how important is something for you now compared to the future, like at your next job? This is studies that I ran with Kaitlin Woolley now at Cornell with MBA students. People answering questions such as, how important is pay for you now, how important pay is going to be for you when you apply to your next job? How important is doing something interesting with people that you like now, how important will it be in the future? People are accurate about pay. They say pay is important now and will be important in the future. When it gets to social connection and doing something interesting, people say right now that’s what gets me out of bed, when applying to my next job, that will be less important. So not only we mispredict how much others care to be basically intrinsically motivated at work, we also fail to predict how important it is for us in our future job.

So when you plan your future job, when you plan what you’re going to do in your current job, what’s the next project? Pay is important, but it also important that you will enjoy doing it. You will develop yourself, you will be working with people that you interact well with.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, I mean that part, that social part seems critical, that maybe when you’re looking at opportunities, you think about, who would I like to be working with as much as what I would like to be doing.

Ayelet Fishbach: Absolutely, and that’s the part that I think is the hardest for us, that work is very much about social interaction.

Hal Weitzman: Well, Ayelet Fishbach, thank you so much for coming in person. I’ve enjoyed this social interaction, it’s been extremely engaging, feel very, very motivated. So thank you very much. It’s been great having you again on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Ayelet Fishbach: So wonderful to share my room with you, Hal. Thank you.

Hal Weitzman: That’s it for this episode. To learn more, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you’re there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I’m Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.