If staff don’t want to work any more, leaders should step up

The writer is author of ‘How to Be a Better Leader’ and is a visiting professor at Bayes Business School, City, University of London

“Nobody wants to work anymore”, reported York County’s Gazette and Daily, one of America’s oldest newspapers, in 1937. It was not a new story. “Nobody wants to work as hard as they used to”, declared a food wholesaler to a reporter from the Binghamton Press in New York, in 1916.

If today’s managers are aware of these century-old reports, too few show it. Qu Jing, PR chief at Chinese tech giant Baidu, recently made headlines after telling colleagues that if they work in public relations they should not “expect weekends off”. She most likely has both weekdays and weekends free, after being ejected from the company following her comments.

This is not to say these leaders do not have a point: after lockdowns, a cost of living crisis and global unrest, today’s workers do seem disaffected. In a global Randstad survey this year, over half signalled they were happy to forgo promotion; 64 per cent said their personal life was more important than their work. Apathy appears especially rampant in the UK, where just 73 per cent of respondents to a King’s College London survey said work was important in their life, compared to 80 per cent in the US.

Moaning managers, however, ignore an inconvenient truth: bosses are far from powerless when it comes to staff disengagement. If “we have fallen out of love with work”, as Paul Bickley argues in a paper for UK think-tank Theos, a good boss will ask why. Rather than simply assuming a bad attitude, they will change the terms and conditions that chip away at a strong work ethic. “People want to work,” Bickley writes, “and in a better future would not have to compromise between a good job and a good life.”

The impact of management on staff’s ability to flourish is well documented. Last year the UK’s Chartered Management Institute asked more than 2,000 employees whether they felt “valued and appreciated” at work. Nearly three quarters of those who worked with an effective manager said they did. But only 15 per cent of those working with a poor manager could say the same.

An engaged workforce appears to have helped some businesses surpass expectations in recent years. Take the online bank First Direct. It enjoyed its best ever year in 2023, signing up its highest number of new customers, nearly half of whom are under 35.

Chris Pitt, chief executive since 2020, attributes some of this success to four values: “stand together”, “bring a smile”, “make things better” and “give a shit”. In practice, that means staff are given autonomy, with no scripts to stick to, and no average handling times measured on calls. Since lockdown, employees are free to work at home or in the office, whichever suits them best. Customer calls are always answered by a human being, not a bot. And dozens of staff have been deployed to advise specifically on areas like financial vulnerability and domestic violence.

There does not seem to be a work ethic crisis here. The bank regularly tops all industry customer service league tables.

During the pandemic, other employers learnt valuable lessons for engaging a disaffected workforce. In the UK’s National Health Service, the extraordinary circumstances meant staff were given more autonomy to take decisions and collaborate across departments, says Sarah Pass, who has been researching the phenomenon at Nottingham Business School. But some staff feel this freedom has been lost with the return to normality — potentially resulting in problems for engagement.

Pass offers a counterpoint to managers bemoaning the “bad attitude” of younger colleagues. Gen Z and millennials, she says, have reason to be disaffected: housing costs, higher education financing and skinnier pension plans all make for a less rosy future than that enjoyed by many of today’s 60-somethings. Why go the extra mile for an employer who does not appear to care?

“It’s not that people don’t want to work,” says Jo Causon, chief executive of the Institute of Customer Service, “but they do want to know that the work they are doing is meaningful.” Leaders should not duck their responsibility for low levels of engagement.

The management guru Peter Drucker would sometimes ask a room full of executives how many of them had “dead wood” in their teams or businesses. A lot of hands would go up. And then came his supplementary: “Were they dead wood when you hired them, or did they become so under your command?”

You have to admit it’s a pretty good question.