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Key Takeaways Employee disengagement isn’t just about work conditions — it’s about suppressing creativity and personal voice.
Brands and workplaces thrive when they share creative control and prioritize authenticity over scale.
AI can amplify human expression, but trust, meaning and impact still require real people.
Could the very thing that drives us be what’s missing from today’s workforce?
It’s often quoted that we spend a third of our lives at work — 90,000 hours. True or not, the haunting figure captures a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo that many of us already feel.
Done with waiting for the clock to strike five and the padded four walls of a cubicle, Americans jumped ship from corporate America two years later in record-breaking numbers during what’s now called The Great Resignation.
For some, it was retirement or relocation, but for others it was a new start, a way to get out of the stale business roles that had nearly cost them their sanity and to find their voice in a world where they’d lost theirs.
While The Great Resignation may be behind us, it’s no secret that the term “employee engagement” has practically become an oxymoron, with engagement now down to a paltry 21% for employees and 27% for managers. But why is that? Should we blame Herman Miller for the cubicle farms that made us feel like subjects in a psych experiment gone wrong, or Henry Ford for the mind-numbing eight-hour shift or the Industrial Revolution’s 80-hour weeks for making America think a “mere” forty was somehow acceptable?
Productivity and long hours aside, who or what is driving the disengagement, and is there any hope of resuscitating the American workforce, or should we even try?
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