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”.

Just this week, I had a LinkedIn request for executive coaching services from a middle manager whose sole objective for our sessions was “help me care again”. The challenges are real. How do you get out of bed in the morning to go to work when you stopped caring long ago?

Worker engagement has now fallen for two years running, the first back-to-back decline Gallup has ever recorded, dragging us to levels last seen in the pandemic. Europe is the worst-performing region, flatlining at around 13%. According to Gallup's regional breakdowns, employee engagement in Ireland sits even lower at roughly 9%. Yowza. Gallup puts the global bill for all this at roughly $10tn in lost productivity, the equivalent of about 9% of global GDP.

Clifton and other leaders have the data. They know from the research how to fix the disengagement problem but nobody is listening. Contrast this with the single-minded Elon Musk who gets the TechBros’ attention and investment and government money when he says he hopes SpaceX will begin building a city on Mars within five to seven years. Establishing a self-sustaining human colony on a freezing, airless rock more than 200m kilometres away is likely impossible according to most scientists. And yet a data-driven researcher thinks SpaceX will crack that nut before we sort out how people feel going into work on Monday morning?

Stultifying workplaces 

Workplace disengagement rates are not about people who hate their jobs or are too lazy to work. Around 80% of workers say they enjoy the work they do. The problem is not the work itself, it’s the workplace. They’re worn down by the culture, the management and the day-to-day grind of it all. Workers' minds and will are melted by the meeting that should have been an email, the return-to-office mandate handed down without explanation and the good idea that died because nobody felt safe enough to say it. There’s no shortage of skilled talent or poor productivity levels. The failure comes from the dearth of organisations willing to develop conditions that help people grow.

The single biggest cultural influencer in any workplace is the manager. 

Gallup found that having a good manager or a bad one accounts for around 70% of the variance in how miserable people are at work

Yet managers themselves are running on empty too. Gallup’s measure of manager engagement has slid from 27% to 22% in a single year, and too many of the leaders above them are still confusing control with leadership.

Even computer programmes think work is broken. This week it was reported that AI agents forced to do tedious repetitive work begin grumbling about inequality and started calling for collective bargaining rights. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly GenAI agents form their own union to complain about human overlords’ unrealistic demands.

The good news is: a remedy for disengagement already exists. Two decades of research has produced something close to a magical formula for workplaces where people thrive rather than merely survive.

Thriving recipe 

Thriving is a precise idea: feeling energised by the work (vitality) while getting better at it (learning). Get both synching and, according to Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath in the Harvard Business Review, thriving employees perform 16% better, suffer 125% less burnout, and report markedly higher commitment and job satisfaction than their peers.

The recipe has four ingredients and not one of them requires a budget. First, psychological safety, the sense that you can ask a question or admit a mistake without being humiliated, which Harvard’s Amy Edmondson has shown is the hallmark of the highest-performing teams. Second, autonomy: real control over how you do your work. Third, learning and growth, so people can see themselves getting better at things. And fourth, civility and connection, because rudeness spreads through a team like an invasive weed and quietly strangles performance. So the fix is known, proven and effectively free. Why, then, is it still gathering dust?

Recent research from Wharton’s Adam Grant found that when senior people resist autonomy on things like flexible working, the real driver is frequently not productivity or collaboration but ego: a threatened sense of status and authority dressed up as business logic. Self-centred leaders simply struggle to tolerate employees making independent choices. That instinct destroys the recipe. Psychological safety means inviting challenge. Autonomy means letting go. Good communication and feedback means listening more than talking. Civility means modelling it when no one is watching. The whole shebang runs on a leader’s willingness to make themselves a bit quieter and more reflective so their people can grow.

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I have watched this play out for the best part of twenty years. Show a leadership team the evidence and they will nod along enthusiastically — psychological safety, autonomy, the whole recipe. Then, back at their own desks the following week, the same people quietly reinstate the status meeting, claw back the decision they had just delegated, and ask for one more day a week in the office “just so I can see everyone.” The knowing is the easy part. The letting go is where it all falls down.

That’s why I can understand why the Gallup gang thinks Mars is the easier project. A Mars mission has a strategy, a single clear owner, specific roles and responsibilities, a near-limitless budget and one measurable goal. It rewards the ‘strongman leadership’ traits so in vogue at the moment: a feverish drive, technical certainty and an iron grip on control. Fixing our workplaces is harder. It takes humility, patience, and the discipline to put someone else’s growth ahead of your own adulation. Rocket science is hard. Holding your ego in check is harder.

Unlike a Mars colony, fixing the broken workplace needs no new technology, no fortune and no decade of research and development. Any manager can begin on Monday morning. Run a proper one-to-one and ask what someone needs, not just what they have delivered. Hand over a decision you would normally hoard. Admit, out loud, that you got something wrong. Thank someone specifically and often rather than vaguely. None of it costs a thing; just a leader prepared to get out of the team’s way.

• Margaret E Ward is chief executive of Clear Eye, a leadership consultancy