What to do about worker disengagement

Let's take on the question of employee ennui, exploring why both idle and busy hands make the devil's workshop. I'll conclude with a radical treatment option: organizational death therapy.

Welp, another what-did-you-do-last-week email just went out. That’ll help.

But the pain of worker disengagement is real—and not just for owners and managers. I need other people to get their stuff done so I can do my stuff, right?

So this week, I want to offer some radical therapy for worker disengagement.

I think, first, we have to face the fact that the problem is significantly traceable to national politics. The Mode/Switch isn’t a partisan newsletter. It’s a work-culture newsletter. My goal is to identify localized shifts for wellbeing in working community.

But in 2025, it’s impossible to write about work culture and not talk about political culture. To cite but one example: federal Return to Office mandates make private-sector discourse flammable instead of discussable. As journalist Francesca Di Meglio notes, “the debate is more nuanced than most realize, and the back and forth between workers and executives is having negative implications on engagement and productivity.” Inflamed debate doesn’t encourage the owner/employee discussions we need to have about what’s good for our companies. No wonder one Gallup poll reports “U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low.”

But how should we respond to worker disengagement? Let’s look for answers with a Trend, a Study, a Story, and a Shift. This week, I’ll start with the narrative.

A Story

One piece of temporary advice for disengaged workers is to fake it till you make it.

When I got the most devastating text of my life so far, I was sitting in an auto mechanic’s shop, waiting on an oil change. The text was short: the test results had come in, and the news was bad. And then the loved one’s text added: “Don’t call me.” That last bit was especially hard. I mean, I knew our family had to go back to work and keep ourselves intact somehow. But the don’t-call-me-now practicality felt cruel. I wanted to go sit on our kitchen floor and cry. Instead, I had to go to work and pretend like things were okay—for the sake of productivity and professionalism.

In these politically chaotic days, I’m feeling the cost of an fake-it-till-you-make-it ethos. The news keeps undercutting my fakery. Even though I’ve pulled way back on news consumption (heeding my colleague Debra Rienstra’s warnings about “discourse trauma”) I still ride my bike to work, feeling a headachy sense of dread.

Every era’s got its challenges, and (like a friend of mine said over beers last night) the world just keeps right on ending like it always does. But interaction of work stuff and political stuff does feel especially intense right now. When I entered the workforce in the 1990s, a 22-year-old could afford a certain level of naïveté. Job and economy and government and church and school basically cooperated with each other. In other words, a kid like me could more or less compartmentalize safely. Get your degree, do your job, place your vote, and have a nice weekend. It all felt like an episode of West Wing: the world’s full of problems, but not to worry—smart people are running things.

But these days, I don’t believe we have a Josh or a Toby or a Jed. I was in a meeting yesterday where a colleague said it felt like our administrators were overmatched by their problems. Outgunned, was the word he used.

So, yeah, pretending everything’s okay is a workable but temporary approach to scary diagnoses across our orgs and across the country.

Temporary, because eventually busy hands become the devil’s workshop.

A Trend

Go with me on this one for a minute. Straw poll: Should you leave the john door ajar at work? A very quick survey of Reddit suggests the majority opinion offers a resounding nope, though there are dissenters.

I mention this query, because cultivating better office smells is one way that managers now hope to heighten worker productivity.

Ever heard of biophilic workspaces? Company owners and team managers are turning to tech to create workspaces that feel like the great out-of-doors. If you’re going to make people return to office—the managerial logic goes—you need to make the office more like a park. So, instead of white-painted drywall, you create a green wall of plants. Instead of a white-noise machine, you infuse your workspace with birdsong. Instead of Febreze, you disseminate a scent of mint.

It used to be that scent diffusion at work traced to Herman and his post-lunch BM. These days, managers buy commercial scent diffusers to make the workplace smell like peppermint or cinnamon.

But what do you think? Do biophilic workspaces heighten productivity? Would HR offices be more likable if they smelled like chocolate chip cookies?

My hunch is that worker disengagement these days has more to do with what’s happening outside than with what’s happening inside the office.

A Study

Let’s look at a peer-reviewed study to make a deeper sense of worker disengagement. We tend to think of worker engagement in binary terms. For example, Gen Xers like myself are thought of as work compulsives, while Gen Zers like my kids are assumed to be work aversives. The oldsters are addicted to work; the youngsters avoid it, etc.

But I just published an article in Southern Journal of Communication that identifies multiple ways we posture ourselves towards our jobs. The article argues that worker engagement has less to do with job involvement than with work itself.

But our postures towards work are shaped by all sorts of factors, including the political conditions of the day. (In fact, I was surprised by how many workers saw their jobs as explicitly addressing social and political problems. I would have expected more occupational ennui. Well, there was plenty of that, too.)

But however you intuit a connection between work and society, your job can feel empty. What’s the point of checking a spreadsheet, if the world’s so chaotic?

A Shift

When I switched jobs in 2022, I immediately ran into a lot of organizational distress. It took me a while to figure it out, because sometimes that distress looked like workaholism. Sometimes it looked like cynicism. Sometimes it sounded like glad-handing or hysteric laughter. (Oh wait, that was me.)

If we are dealing with unacknowledged organizational—well, I’ll just say trauma, though the word gets thrown around way too often—then, maybe we need death therapy for our organizations.

Think of the Dutch East India Company in the 1700s, Woolworth's in the 1800s, Pan Am in the 1900s, Bear Sterns in the 2000s. Each looked invincible. Each up and died. Your organization will, too. Every institution we depend on today will eventually keel over not too, too long from now. The sooner we can admit that every org will die, the more sustainable our posture towards work can be.

But how does org death therapy help with worker disengagement?

It helps our leadership wisen up. If you’re leading an organization, and you’re thinking only of survival, you’re not doing your best thinking. Your lizard-brain decision-making’s going to deepen your team’s ennui. But if you give up on assuming that institutions will last forever, you can also be freed of thinking that they must last forever. That helps you not to use your vital mission to ask employees to pay too much for organizational survival.

It’s a good way to increase engagement without cultivating burnout. Oliver Burkeman has identified a paradoxical truth: by embracing the inevitability of your death, you end up living more richly, more fully. You stop being busy and you start living. I think something like that obtains on an organizational level, too. If we can face the fragility of our companies, we can also come to care for them more. If we concede that our orgs will die, we have a chance to see anew the values they preserve. And we can put our shoulders behind those values for as long as possible.

A final note

Walker Percy said that being a novelist was a matter of saying things like, “I don’t feel so good. Do you?” You may have noticed that such a question’s at the back of this week’s Mode/Switch.

The other day I was having lunch with a friend who said he thought we were forgetting a pandemic lesson. Remember when we peered into our laptop screens, doing little waves, and asking simple questions like “How are you really doing today?” My friend’s observation animates this week’s newsletter. When we encounter worker disengagement, don’t buy a scent disseminator. Don’t categorize people into love/hate binaries. Instead, get better at asking, how are you really doing today? The answers may show us pathways to re-engagement.