I’ve been at the same job now for a while, and I’m really starting to hate it. My work is boring, repetitive, uninspiring, stressful at times, and needlessly bureaucratic – and the seemingly endless turnstile of incompetent managers doesn’t help either. I’d quit, but I need the $$$. Besides, I feel like anywhere else I might go things won’t be much better anyway, so why bother? At least I have some seniority here. But I used to care about what I do, and now I just go through the motions. Where is the job of my dreams?? – Name withheld       

Yeah – that sounds pretty bleak.

So maybe this is as good an excuse as any to review The Gallup Organization’s “State of the Global Workplace” Report (2024), which was released earlier this month.[1]

According to Gallup, 62% of the world’s workers are “not engaged” in their jobs. Another 15% are disengaged, they determined, meaning those employees actively oppose organizational goals. 58% of the global workforce also describe themselves as “struggling,” while another 8% say they are “suffering.” If you find yourself increasingly dissatisfied by your work situation, in other words, it seems you’re not alone.

Employee wellbeing is also down according to Gallup’s research (from 35% to 34% in 2023). Distressingly, this now seems especially true for younger workers (under the age of 35), whereas a decade ago, it was older workers who reported lower life evaluations. Not surprisingly, things appear to be the worst for the disengaged. Workers who fit this description report higher levels of stress, anger, worry, sadness, and loneliness than their non-engaged and engaged peers. By some measures (stress, anger, worry), those levels are equal to, or even worse than for the unemployed.

Think about that for a moment: For some, being unemployed is actually less stressful than having a job.

As a matter of fact, Gallup found on-job-stress to be especially pervasive: 41% of all employees report feeling stress on a daily basis (up from 31% in 2009). And as Gallup explains, a lot of this has to do with how they’re being managed:

“Those who work in companies with bad management practices…are nearly 60% more likely to be stressed than people working in environments with good management practices…” (p. 1).

But being a manager yourself doesn’t appear to offer much protection, though. In fact, in some ways they seem to have it worse. While managers are more likely to describe themselves as “engaged and thriving in life,” they also confess to being stressed out, angry and lonely more frequently than non-managers.

So what, if anything, can you do about this?

Well, according to Gallup, it would sure help if you had a better manager. 70% of the variance in team engagement can be directly attributed to one’s manager, Gallup concluded.[2] Looking for your “dream job” somewhere else is always a possibility, I suppose, but my inclination is to agree with you in thinking it’s unlikely to lead to a better situation. In my experience, it may even make things worse. Bad management is bad management – and unfortunately, bad management practices are pretty much the norm wherever you go.

Gallup is also in the management consulting business, so they’re a bit more optimistic in this regard (in part because they’re motivated to sell companies on their services). To this end, they’ve developed proprietary methodology for measuring employee “engagement” – and based on those results are able to prescribe specific management behaviors aimed at improving it. If you’re interested in learning more about Gallup’s methods and techniques, I suggest you read 12, The Elements of Great Managing (2006), or It’s the Manager (2019), both published by Gallup Press.

But let me save you the $21.95 or whatever you might spend on one of these texts (or the many thousands of dollars Gallup no doubt charges for its consulting services), and summarize their approach for you.

Fundamentally, “good management” is about support. Managers are more effective—and their organizations are more profitable—when they behave as if their employees are “in charge” of them, not the other way around. For a manager, employees are the customer, in other words. It’s as simple as that – as the evidence overwhelmingly suggests.[3]

Or, to put it another way:

Managers are most effective when they subordinate themselves to their employees. As a manager, your employees are your boss.

As I said, this approach to managing is consistent with all the available data – of which Gallup’s research is a part. It results in significantly higher levels of employee engagement, and therefore increases organizational productivity. It has also proven effective regardless of the industry in which you work, and, once you become accustomed to this strategy, is surprisingly intuitive. I refer to it as management by loerarchy.

Nevertheless, I sincerely doubt that your own manager will be terribly receptive to the idea, were you to put it to them. This is in part because traditional, top-down, command-and-control hierarchical management practices remain deeply ingrained in the current business culture as seem incontrovertible. Even the suggestion of “flipping” the supervisor-subordinate relationship is likely enough to make a manager blanch – especially if that suggestion comes from a lowly “subordinate.”

Still, it is my hope that someday soon, the businesses of today will catch up with the science behind good management, and alter their practices accordingly. We’ll all be better off when managers start acting like their employees are in charge of them, not the other way around – yourself included.

In the meantime, it seems you’ll just have to wait…right along with the rest of the world.

NOTES:

[1] Gallup’s report is available as a free download at the company’s website.

[2] Clifton, Jim, and Jim Harter. It’s the Manager. 2019 (Gallup Press), p. 12.

[3] For more on this, check out my post: The one thing you think you know about managing is wrong.