Margaret E Ward: Why fixing the workplace is harder than reaching Mars

Margaret E Ward says that better leadership, not bigger budgets, is the proven answer to employee disengagement and burnout

According to research, just one in five employees worldwide is engaged at work.

“We’re closer to colonising Mars than we are to fixing the world’s broken workplace,” said Jon Clifton, chief executive of Gallup, the research firm that has spent decades measuring how the planet feels about work. The line has become a running joke inside Gallup, he said this month, speaking on a panel at the Jobs for the Future Horizons conference in Washington DC. When an important issue becomes an eyeroll and a gag, you know the team has spent way too much time banging their heads against the wall trying to solve it.

Of course, Clifton has the numbers to justify the doom-mongering. Just one in five employees worldwide is engaged at work, according to Gallup’s latest global figures. Put the other way around, four out of five of us are “checked out”.