Joyless work: why culture matters to counter slump in engagement
Employee engagement is now at its lowest level since the pandemic according to Gallup. Could a better understanding how company culture is affected by hybrid work stem the tide of misery?
Given growing business focus on experience, wellbeing and belonging – not to mention the sheer volume of design and technology innovations designed to make our working lives better – you might be forgiven for thinking that levels of employee engagement in the workplace would be rising fast.
Not so. The latest survey data on engagement makes for grim reading, dispelling the notion that a rising tide lifts all boats. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, global engagement has been dropping like a stone. It fell for the second successive year to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since the depths of the global pandemic in 2020, at a cost to the world economy estimated at US $10 trillion.
Gallup’s survey of 263,000 people in around 140 countries attributes much of the downturn to managers going missing, which in turn leads to a failure to translate individual productivity gains from AI into organisational benefits. It’s a gloomy picture and the Wall Street Journal goes further, finding a term for the malaise: joyless work.
Unreasonable expectations
A joyless workplace is what happens when perks introduced to support a return to the office are withdrawn – where’s my free coffee? – and AI ramps up productivity expectations to unreasonable levels – where’s my downtime? Expert opinion might differ over the precise reasons for why the working week can be such misery for millions of people, but there is general consensus on one key point: workplaces are joyless not for technical reasons but for cultural ones. Culture doesn’t just eat strategy for breakfast; it devours design and technology too.
Given that culture is so widely acknowledged as a make-or-break factor, it’s surprising how little research is available into how hybrid working affects cultural patterns within large organisations. It’s a vast subject that makes it difficult for researchers to handle, but that hasn’t stopped some scientists from trying to understand the picture more clearly.
A study by Arena, Hines and Golden (2023) from the University of Pennsylvania, in partnership with Amazon Web Services, evaluated ten attributes critical to an organisation’s culture in a study of more than 50,000 employees across three years. The study found that, with the rise of hybrid working, culture has become clustered, contagious and context dependent.
In other words, culture is not evenly distributed across an organisation – it evolves in pockets within the network (the cluster effect); employees shape each other’s experience so that certain cultural behaviours are modelled and reinforced person-to-person (the contagion effect); and the degree to which cultural behaviours are transmitted from group to group varies based on conditions surrounding a group (the context effect).
Uneven transmission
This framework of 3 Cs holds some clues as to why engagement is currently on the floor and why work is seen by many employees as joyless. Senior leaders might think that top-down cultural initiatives are hitting the mark company-wide when the effects might only be felt in certain clusters and be heavily dependent on an uneven and uncertain transmission across the hybrid workforce.
Does it matter that levels of engagement are so low, especially at a time when there is evidence that a darkening economic outlook is encouraging employees to stick rather than twist in the job market?
Most company bosses will tell you that it matters a lot. Having offices full of disheartened people, even mildly so, impacts such areas as learning and innovation. Upskilling for the age of AI becomes more difficult.
Gallup says that one way to look at levels of employee engagement in an organisation is as a measure of readiness to change. If companies can’t flex and adapt in the current volatile climate, they’re likely to face big trouble.
Understanding how cultural ideas catch hold, are shared and transmitted inside the hybrid organisation will go some way to raise levels of engagement and – dare we say it – make work less painful and joyless to experience.
