How Employees Felt in 2020

It’s been a strange year. Many people we know have been working at home, unsure of the future of their job and unsure of the future of their company. Our employee insights demonstrate just how strange it’s been.

At the end of every week we ask employees to rate their motivation at work, and answer a few questions about their experience at work. The results from 120,774 answers from across the past two years fluctuate more than we’ve ever seen, particularly towards the start of the year, when Covid-19 first hit. 

We saw the biggest declines to engagement in Q2

The most dramatic change to employees’ responses to our engagement questions came in Q2 in response to the question, ‘Do you feel secure in your job?’ This score was down 16.23% between Q1 and Q2 2020. Bear in mind double digit changes are extremely rare, and the biggest historical change to this score within a single quarter was just 0.9%.

The response to this question hardly needs an explanation. Some of our clients’ employees were made redundant or furloughed. As their organisation’s outlook changed from week-to-week in the early days of lockdown, many employees felt unsure of their company’s future, and their own.

However, managers and people departments seemed to have responded well to this feeling, and quickly introduced improvements to their direct reports’ experience of work.

For example, when asked whether they had received praise for doing good work, they responded 5.1% more positively, vs the biggest previous historical change of 0.9%. Likewise, employees felt 5.1% more positively about the recognition they get for their good work, vs the highest previous change of 0.6%. 

Then when we look at the overall Wellbeing Score, we see that this dropped 2.7%, while the Communication Score increased 3.1%. As the personal and professional situation became more difficult for employees, managers improved communication with their direct reports to help them understand how they planned to navigate this tricky period. We saw this effect across both senior and local managers.

Between Q1 and Q2 overall motivation decreased 4.4% and sentiment decreased 4.3%. While motivation is understood directly in response to the question ‘How motivated did you feel at work today?’, sentiment is influenced by the ratio of positive / negative words employees use in the update they share with their manager at the end of the week. 

Not only did this score dip by -4.42% in Q2, it declined further in Q3 by -7.07%, especially at the start of Q3 when we were still in the early stages of the pandemic. However, Q3 otherwise marked a turning point for how employees felt about work.

Most answers bounced back in Q3

As employees became used to working at home and started to feel more secure in their role, their overall engagement began to improve. Answers to the question ‘Do you feel secure in your job?’ improved by 12.9% (the single biggest improvement in Q3), and then saw another slight increase in Q4.

Employees also became more satisfied with their work from home setup, with responses to the question ‘How happy are you with the facilities at work?’ up 2.4%. This was mostly due to employers helping their team with their work from home set up.

Interestingly, it took until Q4 for motivation and sentiment to start to rise again (by 2%). This shows that although management can take steps to communicate with their staff and positively influence their working environment, the personal and professional challenges employees faced in Q2 had a lasting impact on their experience of work.

Overall, between Q2 and Q3, the only significant change to overall engagement we saw was that the Communication Score dropped 2%. This shows that employers should continue to keep their employees updated as frequently as they did during Q2. As many of us get used to working from home - or going back into the office - it’s easy to fall into the communication patterns we’re used to, not necessarily the ones employees need. 

Employees feel stable but more stressed in Q4

Though the quarter is still far from over, we’re seeing engagement and motivation level out between Q3 and Q4, while sentiment has improved 2%. However, stress levels appear to be increasing too.

Between Q3 and Q4 responses to the question “How stressed do you feel at work?” increased 4.5%. We expect this is due to employees’ increased workload as their team size has shrunk with redundancies, or as they return to work from a period of furlough.

Looking forward…

It will be interesting to see how the year ends. How will employers offer their teams the opportunities to socialise more as the festive season arrives? How will they wrap up the year and outline their future plans? 

Despite ‘unprecedented’ being the most over-used word of 2020, it’s still the most relevant. The rest of the year is still uncharted waters for most businesses, and their employees are still looking closely to see how they’ll respond.

Eamon Tuhami, 2020