The average person will spend more than 80,000 hours across their lifetime working. Work should provide us with the means to enjoy a comfortable standard of living, and ultimately to feel fulfilled, healthy and happy. Strikingly, however, it’s been found that just 11% of UK workers feel engaged in their jobs, while the average Brit will consider quitting their job sixteen times a year.

These figures should be of alarm to large employers across the country. Research highlights how disengagement on this scale hampers productivity and hinders efficiency: disengaged workers are found to have 37% higher rates of absenteeism and 18% lower productivity. These concerns, however, are not isolated solely to organisational management; they are issues of national importance as they interact with wider societal fulfillment, mental health outcomes and living standards.

Data launched last week by the High Pay Centre, however, illustrates a staggering absence of response from large companies in terms of seeking to understand the people that work for them. The data, collected from FTSE 100 annual reports, aims to understand who contributes to value in these large companies and how that is rewarded.

The information gap

Most glaring is the lack of information on the workforce, as well as the nature of engagement between firms and their employees. This is despite the workforce being instrumental to growth, and typically being a firm’s largest cost:

•  No FTSE 100 company has appointed a worker director to the board
•  Just 12% of workers are meaningfully consulted on the executive pay-setting process
•  17% of firms disclose internal trade union coverage
•  10% of firms report on the extent to which their workforce is contracted out
•  49% of assessed companies provide some detail of schemes promoting employee share ownership

As the report, Fair Reward Framework: A three-year review of the findings, sets out, there has been little improvement on the majority of indicators over the past three years, and even some backsliding. Given the context of a cost-of-living crisis, a mere 1% increase in the percentage of firms with Living Wage Accreditation, for instance, is inexcusable.

This has come at the same time as a significant increase in internal inequality within the same companies: average CEO pay is up 33% since 2023 to £6.02 million, while a CEO’s typical pay package rose from 93 times that of their median employee to 100 times in the same period.

Living standards

It’s not just pay that matters, either. Political efforts to raise wage floors through minimum wage increases are commendable and necessary, yet just four firms are ‘living hours’ accredited—a standard that guarantees secure and stable working hours. Job quality is not one-dimensional; a range of factors determine wider living standards, from pension provision to working hours and employee shareholdings, yet these receive far less attention than pay.

Crucially, understanding how employees experience work can help firms to recognise where skill and training gaps exist, or where issues around wellbeing and conditions are restricting productivity. If a company fails to even try to understand their employees, what their interests and needs are and how work can be improved for them, is it really such a shock that so many of us don’t feel engaged?

The fact that firms with strong workforce analytics demonstrate roughly 30% greater operational efficiency than their peers in times of crisis is illustrative of a broader point: employees who are well-supported, engaged and equipped with the necessary skills will be a greater asset to business performance.

One anecdote shared with me recently describing a manufacturing firm in the US reinforces this: after being granted the opportunity to invest a portion of the firm’s profits in a cause of their choosing, staff decided that the money would be best spent on air conditioning on the factory floor. In the first performance review following the installation of the air conditioning, it was found that productivity and operational efficiency were up significantly on previous levels. This supports the intuitive conclusion that employees are typically better placed to understand their own needs than middle managers who are further detached from the realities of frontline work.

What can be done?

The report offers a number of recommendations on how the current situation could be improved, including: strengthening the UK Corporate Governance Code to ensure genuine mechanisms for worker voice; greater reporting of workers on low wages to enhance understanding of how firms treat their employees; and a dedicated workforce section in annual reports to ensure employee issues are embedded into long-term corporate decision-making.

While there are occasional snippets of detailed, balanced assessments of performance, the majority of reports lack honesty, self-criticality and fail to outline how and why companies are failing in certain areas. Ultimately, a culture shift within the corporate world is needed. Effective workforce reporting has to be seen as a strategic opportunity for both firms and employees, rather than the burdensome compliance exercise it is often viewed as today.

It would be inaccurate to claim that this alone could resolve the UK’s evident issues with job quality, but it would certainly go a long way towards repairing the weak relationship between employer and employee that is essential to creating engaging and fulfilling work.

Paddy Goffey is head of research and policy at the High Pay Centre, a think tank for fairer pay, worker voice and better business.