Employee engagement is falling. Workers are less willing to go the extra mile. Perhaps the problem isn’t their attitude. Perhaps they’ve finally read the terms and conditions.

The Financial Times reports this week that quiet quitting is real. British workers, the lazy bastards, are increasingly reluctant to go above and beyond the requirements of their jobs.

The Resolution Foundation, the Provisional Wing of Waitrose whose research prompted the story, calls it a dissatisfaction drain. Job satisfaction has fallen to its lowest recorded level, and employees are less inclined to contribute extra effort.

Same data, different framing. One version says workers have developed a troubling attitude problem. The other raises the possibility that they might have a point.

Maybe people have worked out that work doesn’t love them back.

After years of being told to live the values, think like owners, find their purpose, adopt a growth mindset, become culture ambassadors, practise radical candour, embrace psychological safety, bring (just the right amount of) their authentic selves, celebrate colleagues on the recognition platform, describe what belonging means to them in three words on a virtual Post-it note, attend a lunchtime webinar on resilience, and think of the organisation as one big family, employees have finally done something nobody in HR saw coming.

They’ve read the terms and conditions.

And it turns out this family reserves the right to change them whenever they like.

The deal has got worse

In 2015, 81% of British workers said they were satisfied with their main job. By 2025, that had fallen to 74%, the lowest level since records began in 1989, at the height of Thatcherite reforms, when dock workers were striking over the abolition of their employment protections and nobody thought to address the problem with a Headspace subscription.

The proportion who found their jobs interesting fell from 74% to 63%. Those who saw opportunities for advancement dropped from 35% to 26%.

And contrary to the prevailing view among executives, who appear to believe their workforce is powered by mission statements, most people work for money. Grubby, unglamorous money, which they exchange for things like rent, transport, trousers, associated sundries, and food: the fuel their stupid mortal bodies insist on, three times a day, every day, forever.

They would quite like more of it. In fact, 78% now say a high income is important to them, up from 67% a decade ago. Unfortunately, only 23% say their job actually provides one.

This may come as a shock to executives whose own sense of purpose is reinforced by a seven-figure remuneration package.

There’s a similarly spectacular mismatch on flexibility. While 61% consider control over their working hours important, only 31% say their current job offers it.

So people would like interesting work, opportunities to progress, decent pay and some control over their lives. And employers are increasingly failing to provide these things.

Against this backdrop, it’s hardly a surprise that the proportion willing to work harder than required to help their employer succeed fell from 69% to 55%.

Now these are stated attitudes, not measured productivity. The comparison covers a decade that included a pandemic, an inflation shock, the inexplicable global success of Dance Monkey, a mercifully brief obsession with NFTs, the collective decision to pretend matcha tastes good, and significant changes to working patterns. We can’t attribute every movement to deteriorating employment conditions, and it would be daft to try.

But you’d need to be wilfully, heroically obtuse to miss the direction of travel. Britain’s workers have read the small print of modern employment, all of it, and thought: nah, mate.

And yet, the survey also suggests that the Great British Skiver is something of a myth. Just 4% of working-age adults say they’d prefer not to work at all.

The overwhelming majority still want to work, the weirdos. They’ve simply developed some Views about the arrangement.

Quiet quitting is just repricing

I’ve always thought “quiet quitting” was a spectacularly stupid phrase. It describes people who turn up, fulfil their responsibilities and do the work they’re employed to do, while declining to hand over an unspecified amount of extra labour for free. We’ve somehow managed to rebrand doing the job you’re paid for as a form of industrial action.

Imagine applying this standard to any other commercial relationship. You hire a plumber to fix your boiler. They arrive on time, diagnose the problem, replace the faulty part, test the system and present an invoice for the agreed amount.

You wouldn’t accuse them of quiet quitting because they failed to repaint the kitchen, walk the dog and demonstrate a passionate commitment to your family’s long-term plumbing strategy.

Yet that’s what we’ve normalised at work. The good employee doesn’t just do their job. They demonstrate passion. They show commitment. They go above and beyond, volunteer for the culture committee and become an ambassador for a corporate purpose developed by a branding agency in a windowless hotel conference room.

And if they don’t? Well, perhaps we need to have a conversation about their engagement.

Clue’s in the name, lads: Discretionary effort is discretionary. It’s not a debt employees owe their employers for the privilege of dodging the dole queue for another month.

There are good reasons for organisations to want people to contribute beyond their formal responsibilities. Collaboration, initiative and mutual support make workplaces function. Better people than I find genuine satisfaction in helping colleagues and improving things.

But those behaviours emerge from relationships, trust and reciprocity. They aren’t something you can extract indefinitely through motivational messaging and a quarterly pizza lunch.

If people are withdrawing their discretionary effort, perhaps they’ve simply looked at what they put in, looked at what they get back, and decided the exchange rate no longer works in their favour.

That’s not quiet quitting. It’s repricing.

Loyalty (terms and conditions apply)

Last week, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its global workforce. Two days later, it announced quarterly profits of $36.6 billion on revenue of $92.3 billion, up 19%. With a brass neck you could stop a train with, it described the buyouts as offering employees “greater flexibility” and “a new choice”. To be fair, these are voluntary offers, not 60,000 compulsory redundancies. And those data centres won’t pay for themselves.

If you’re nearing retirement with a decent pile of stock, you’d be mad not to take the money and run. Spend your last working years doing what you actually want: travel, opening a restaurant, an ill-advised post-divorce relationship with someone half your age, or methodically pissing your ungrateful children’s inheritance up the wall in a Las Vegas casino.

But consider the view from the desk of someone ten years into their career. The company is making obscene amounts of money. Its executives are queuing up to explain the transformational potential of AI. And a quarter of their colleagues have just been invited to consider pursuing their personal growth journey somewhere else. Nobody has said “you’re optional”, but nobody’s needed to. The people who stay have received the message loud and clear, and it wasn’t the one in the press release.

Microsoft is hardly alone in explaining the new economics of employment. Amazon’s Andy Jassy told staff last year that AI would reduce its total corporate workforce. Shopify’s Tobi Lütke told teams to prove AI couldn’t do the work before asking for another carbon-based unit.

There are legitimate business arguments for all of this. Organisations have to evolve. Technology changes how work gets done. Businesses aren’t charities, and nobody is owed a job for life. But here’s the rub: employees aren’t charities either.

For decades, employers have encouraged people to see work as something more than a transaction. A relationship. A community. A shared endeavour. A family, even. Something worth emotional investment, personal sacrifice and loyalty. Meanwhile, the employer has kept the right to treat that relationship as a line in a spreadsheet, to be deleted when the numbers say so.

Now employees have started applying the same commercial logic to their side of the arrangement, and we’re calling it a crisis.

You can’t spend years telling people they’re your greatest asset, then act surprised when they notice you’re treating them as a depreciating one. The company is entitled to make rational decisions about how much labour it needs. So are the people providing it.

We’ve spent decades trying to fix engagement

Employee engagement has been one of the great corporate obsessions of the past twenty years. We’ve measured it, benchmarked it, segmented it, action-planned it, cascaded it to line managers, bolted it onto executive scorecards and bought software to display it in reassuringly expensive shades of red, amber and green.

We’ve commissioned employee value propositions, culture transformations, listening strategies, recognition platforms, pulse surveys, purpose campaigns and networks of engagement champions, each with a badge. We’ve built detailed personas to help us understand why Sarah, 38, busy working mum, Operations, isn’t sufficiently thrilled about the company’s strategic priorities. We’ve given Sarah a refreshed values lanyard, invited her to a webinar called Navigating Change, and asked her, on a scale of one to ten, how likely she is to recommend the organisation as a Great Place To Work.

Sarah, meanwhile, wants a pay rise, enough colleagues to cover the afternoon shift, and for Brian to stop microwaving fish in the office kitchen. Sadly, none of these is available as an option in the engagement platform’s campaign template.

So, after twenty years of all that, how’s it going?

Gallup puts UK employee engagement at 10%, unchanged for four years. The British Social Attitudes survey shows willingness to put in extra effort falling from 69% to 55% over the past decade.

These are different measures, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Nor can anyone know what would have happened without all those initiatives. Perhaps they prevented things getting even worse.

But after decades of effort, the question deserves asking: what if we’ve spent twenty years mistaking a diagnostic for a treatment?

Engagement tells us something about people’s experience of work. That’s worth knowing, in the same way it’s worth knowing about customer satisfaction, staff turnover, or whether the roof is leaking.

But imagine discovering water pouring through the ceiling and responding by appointing a Head of Ceiling Sentiment. You survey the occupants. You develop a compelling narrative about the organisation’s commitment to hydration. You launch a recognition programme celebrating colleagues who show exceptional resilience in damp conditions. Within a year, you achieve a statistically significant improvement in attitudes towards rain.

The roof is still leaking. Someone’s desk now has a mushroom on it.

This is the trap internal communication has built for itself. We’ve let engagement become something we’re expected to deliver, as though employee sentiment were a product we could manufacture with the right mix of storytelling, leadership visibility and Canva templates.

Once engagement becomes a performance target, the incentive shifts. Instead of improving people’s experience of work, organisations can end up managing the appearance of employee satisfaction. The survey score becomes the thing to fix, while the conditions producing it remain untouched.

And because the people tasked with improving the score frequently have no authority to change those conditions, the answer is more communication. Another campaign. Another town hall. Another listening exercise. Another carefully curated set of employee stories proving this is a wonderful place to work.

All while the people we’re supposedly engaging are wondering whether they’ll still have a job next quarter.

The people in the middle have noticed too

The most interesting finding in the research is where the enthusiasm has drained fastest. It isn’t among TikTokkers who’ve supposedly decided that effort is a tragic Boomer affectation, like cheque books or eye contact. It’s managers and professionals: the experienced ones, the grown-ups, the people organisations have spent decades relying on to stop the whole thing falling over. Their willingness to go the extra mile fell further than anyone’s. And it isn’t just Britain; Gallup’s global figures show manager engagement sliding from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025.

This is a problem for internal communication, because these are the people the entire model runs on. The manager is supposed to translate strategy into local relevance, explain difficult decisions, model the culture, motivate the team, cascade the leadership messages, listen empathetically, feed insights upwards and keep a brave little smile on their face while being told to deliver 15% more with 10% fewer people. Ideally all of this happens in the fifteen minutes between their eighth Teams call of the day and a LinkedIn Learning module on psychological safety, which they’ll watch at double speed with the sound off.

And when they fail to radiate the required enthusiasm, our diagnosis is always the same: they need more communication training. Or a toolkit. A lovely toolkit, with key messages, suggested talking points and a handy FAQ explaining why the restructuring is an exciting opportunity to accelerate our journey.

Maybe, just maybe, managers understand the strategy perfectly well – well enough to hate it. They know what the cuts mean for their teams, because they’re the ones doing the cutting. They can see the gap between the corporate narrative and what is actually happening, because they live in it. They’re the ones explaining to exasperated colleagues why the business can afford a shiny new AI chat interface for the service desk but not a replacement for Sandra, who left in March and whose job is now being done, badly, by three people and a shared mailbox.

The manager cascade only works if the people doing the cascading can make the organisation’s intent sound credible. So what happens when the translators no longer believe the translation?

The deal is the message

So where does this leave internal communication? In a pickle, that’s where.

We’ve spent years arguing that communication is essential to engagement. And it is, up to a point. Good communication reduces uncertainty, helps people do their jobs, makes organisations easier to navigate and gives employees a voice in decisions that affect them.

But it cannot manufacture trust in an organisation behaving in untrustworthy ways. It cannot create security while people watch their colleagues disappear one by one, like a slasher film directed by McKinsey. And it cannot persuade employees they’re valued when every decision suggests they’re a cost to be minimised.

This is where the familiar know/do/feel model drives headlong into a wall marked reality.

We can help people understand what’s happening, what they need to do and why decisions have been made. But you can’t communicate people out of a reasonable response to what they see with their own eyes.

Which raises an uncomfortable question about our own profession.

Every time we accept a brief to ‘improve engagement’ without asking why people are disengaged, we risk becoming part of the machinery that disguises the problem. We take an organisational failure and rebrand it as a communication challenge. We treat the workforce’s entirely reasonable response to its circumstances as something to be corrected with messaging. We’re the crime-scene cleaner, mopping up so efficiently that nobody asks about the body.

And then we wonder why nobody invites us into the room as strategic advisers.

The alternative is harder. It means telling leaders that employees aren’t confused about the strategy – they understand it perfectly well, and they don’t like what it means for them. It means challenging decisions before they’re announced, not just finding a more appealing way to announce them.

Sometimes it means telling the CEO that the fastest way to improve the next engagement survey is to stop commissioning sodding engagement initiatives and start fixing the things people have been complaining about for years. That’s a considerably more useful contribution than another campaign about purpose.

We’ve spent years obsessing over whether employees are prepared to go the extra mile.

Perhaps it’s time to ask whether employers are prepared to meet them halfway.

The deal is the message. And if the deal is shit, no amount of communication is going to make it smell of roses.