Minicast: Declining engagement from employees will impact organisations

After almost three years of workforce disruption, there is a growing dissatisfaction with employees as declining engagement grows within organisations.

Kat Warboys is the marketing director APAC at HubSpot and she discusses with Digital Nation Australia the steps businesses can take to retain their staff.

Employee expectations look very different today as to what they did a couple of years ago, Warboys said.

“The restrictions and lockdowns, have meant that many Australians were prevented from taking holiday and that critical time to rest and recharge.

“Employees across almost every industry and sector, are feeling that burnout now, but not just burnout, but also the lack of opportunity for professional growth, coupled with those pressures at the mounting cost of living,” she explained.

Quiet quitting, a trend that originated from social media has taken off, impacting every industry and raising concerns among executives.

This trend is where an employee is investing as little effort into positive as possible into work when it comes to going outside of their job description and going outside of that black and white expectations of their role, Warboys said.

“Quite quitting is very similar to what we've heard about with the great resignation with a skill shortage. It's essentially a symptom of disengagement,” she explained.

“For organisations, that’s risky that they are not getting maximum productivity out of their employees. Employees themselves are unmotivated and likely to show those results or do the work required. That is throwing into light a lot of questions around remote working, and is a remote or hybrid model for employees responsible for that.”

When it comes to addressing this quiet quitting trend and any form of employee demotivation, what they initially saw was organisations responding with wage wars, Warboys said.

She said that wasn’t the best long-term approach for organisations to take and what businesses need to do is to understand what their value in order to bring back and improve that engagement.

There are two ways this can happen according to Warboys,

“First, we learned from research that we commissioned here at HubSpot into the workforce that told us that 70 percent of Australians are prioritising learning and development opportunities, opportunities with an employer over a competitive salary when looking for a new role.”

She said, “The second part is benefits, organisations need to revisit their employee benefit schemes and take this more innovative approach to people and culture that solves for areas of that disengagement.”