Most US Workers Feel Employers Don’t Care About Their Well-being As They Did At Onset Of Covid

For several months at the outbreak of Covid-19, U.S. employees felt strongly that their organization cared about their wellbeing, but two years later, that feeling has dwindled to just one fourth of the same workforce, according to a new survey released by Gallup.

This is the lowest percentage in nearly a decade.

This finding has significant implications, as work and life have never been more blended and employee wellbeing matters more than ever- to employees and the resiliency of organizations, the international polling organization said on Friday.

The discovery is based on a random sample of 15,001 full and part-time U.S. employees who were surveyed in February 2022.

Prior to Covid-19, in 2014, about the same percentage (25) of employees strongly agreed that their employer cares about their overall wellbeing. Then at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, employers responded quickly with a plan, communication, and what many employees believed was genuine concern for them, their work, and their lives. The percentage who felt cared about nearly doubled, reaching a high of 49 percent in May of that year. Since 2020, the perception has plummeted to the previous low levels, the survey shows.

The one-year decline in employees’ perceptions that their organizations care about their overall wellbeing was generally consistent across employee job types – from production and front-line to white-collar professionals. The decline was especially high among managers.

Gallup found increases in manager burnout in 2021 and declining employee engagement. The surge in cases combined with increased employee resignation rates in 2021 made it difficult for leaders to design and communicate a predictable course of action.

The percentage of employees who are extremely satisfied with their organization as a place to work dropped from 23 to 18 from late 2021 to the first quarter of 2022.

The survey found patterns in organizations that consistently improved their cultures even during the tumultuous last two years, sich as embracing flexible work environments while developing future-of-work plans.

With new variants of the virus emerging in 2020 and 2021, back-to-workplace planning included many frustrating starts and stops for organizational leaders. With the rates of Covid now at a low and decreasing rate in the U.S., the removal of many social restrictions and mask mandates affords organizational leaders the opportunity to set predictable workplace plans in motion, Gallup says.

The United States on Thursday recorded one of the lowest daily number of Covid cases Thursday.

With 45014 new cases of coronavirus infection recorded from across the country, the national total increased to 79,632,049, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.

With 1943 deaths reporting on the same day, total U.S. Covid casualties reached 968,343.

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