Employee attitude can be a reflection of bad leadership

Motivation among employees is dropping, with workers across the globe falling into negative habits as a result of poor leadership.

After a tumultuous 2023 for employees, the world of work is undergoing widespread changes. Employees’ perceptions of their overall workplaces appear to be faltering and have observed a 3 per cent decline year upon year.

Recent data from Culture Amp has highlighted that along with the 3 per cent, the last six months have seen a 1 per cent total decline in global engagement. The size of the dataset reached over 1 billion points, which makes the reduction far from negligible.

It signals a response to a year marked by redundancies, financial strain, disruptive technologies, and geopolitical tensions. The widespread implementation of pay transparency laws is also affecting employees, as they are actively seeing the higher figures that they could be making.

Redundancies, for example, are a key subject that affects employee motivation. Across the media industry, redundancies are becoming a damaging trend. Vice is the latest media company to jump on the redundancy bandwagon as it laid off several hundred employees. The LA Times, Sports Illustrated and Paramount have also made a large number of employees redundant in the past couple of months.

These financial problems within the media industry directly impact the job security of a number of employees, and when job security is somewhat compromised or not stable, motivation can drop because employees can’t see themselves being in their current role for the long term.

This is only one of the key reasons that employees are pulling back their efforts and beginning to question the notion of going above and beyond in their roles. For the moment, about one in three employees are unsure or disagree that their organisation is motivating them to go above and beyond.

A deterioration in leadership principles can also be pinpointed as a top orchestrator behind this now rampant lack of motivation that many employees are adopting. Leaders neglecting processes like performance reviews and regular employee check-ups are just some of the reasons that can be highlighted.

Employees often yearn for any form of recognition from their employer or leaders, and processes like performance reviews and employee check-ups are often a perfect platform to receive this recognition. However, Culture Amp’s report stated that employees are feeling less and less like their impact at their organisation is being seen within their performance review process.

Along with that, there was a -6 per cent decrease in the last six months regarding managers checking in regularly.

Lack of motivation can’t primarily be blamed on the individual employee. Diligent attitudes must come from leaders within organisations that will actively reassure their employees, recognise them, and therefore motivate them to continue being productive. If leaders continue to get behind the eight ball on this, business outcomes could plummet.