PORTLAND, Maine — Nearly seven of every 10 Maine workers is not engaged in their jobs, according to the results of a recent Gallup study.
But that number — in which 68.5 percent of Maine respondents were determined to be either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work — placed the state in the country’s upper half, a fact state Chamber of Commerce leaders characterized as positive.
Across the country, Gallup found that about 70 percent of employees fell under one of those two categories. On the surface, that figure may appear to be discouraging. But that figure is actually lower than in recent years, part of a trend toward a more engaged workforce than U.S. employers have seen in more than a decade.
Maine ranked 19th among states with 31.5 percent of its workers engaged in their jobs, just ahead of New Mexico at 31 percent.
“Employees who are engaged tend to be more productive and tend to have better relationships with their managers, their companies and with the products and services they provide,” said Peter Gore, vice president of advocacy and government relations for the Maine State Chamber of Commerce.
“Sure, you’d like to see employee engagement above 31.5 percent, but in some ways it’s good news,” he continued. “When we’re looking at trying to convince businesses to locate in Maine, this is the kind of thing where you could say, ‘Maine has a more engaged workforce that most other states.’”
Maine was 1 percentage point or less behind the seven states ahead of it on the list, which ranged from No. 12 Florida at 32.5 percent to No. 18 Montana at 31.6 percent.
Louisiana was No. 1 in terms of most engaged employees, at 37 percent, while Minnesota came in last, at 25.7 percent.
The nearly 70-page report is based on an analysis of tens of thousands of worker responses to a Gallup inquiry in 2012, which gauged whether employees felt that their opinions were respected at work or that their jobs were important, among other things.
On Wednesday, Gallup updated its figures with the results of more than 80,000 interviews from 2014, showing an uptick in employee engagement nationwide from 30 percent to about 31.5 percent.
The most recent data showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, managers and company executives with the highest engagement rate, at 38.4 percent.
“You always read about Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer [of Microsoft] saying, ‘We didn’t care about making money, we just loved programming software,’ or Stephen King saying, ‘I didn’t care about making money, I just loved to write,’” said Christopher O’Neil, government liaison for the Portland Community Chamber of Commerce. “That’s easy to say when you’re making millions of dollars. Tell that to the guy working out in the cold at the local gas station.”
Fishermen, farmers and foresters followed the management group with an engagement rate of 33.6 percent, while those in manufacturing or production were the least engaged, at around 23 percent.
Service and sales jobs had engagement percentages of 28.2 percent and 30.6 percent, respectively.
Gore said he and other state chamber officials visit member businesses between legislative sessions to get a sense of what challenges they face.
“To a one, they all say, ‘The most important resource we have to be productive are the people who work with us,’” he said. “There is a recognition among our members that they couldn’t do what they do, they couldn’t produce what they produce or be the viable members of the state’s economy they are if not for the people that work for them.”
Gore also said workforce engagement could be affected by the economy, which, when strong, provides employees more stability and more likelihood of pay increases or better benefits.
“Maine’s economy is not recovered to the extent that certainly other states’ economies have,” he said. “We’re continuing to improve, but supposedly not at the rate that other states are improving. And yet, we remain in the middle of the pack. You could extrapolate from that that Maine employers are perhaps doing a better job in terms of keeping an engaged workforce.”
According to the study, employees nationwide tend to become more passionate about their work as they grow older. Seventy-two percent of workers in the so-called millennial generation — defined in this study as those born after 1980 — were either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their jobs.
That compared to 68 percent of baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, who weren’t engaged in their work, and 58 percent of those from the traditionalist generation, born prior to 1945.
About 70 percent of employees from Generation X, born between 1965 and 1979, fell into one of the disengaged categories.
“It’s not uncommon to hear people dreading work. They’d rather be swimming at the beach on a Sunday than schlepping to the office on a Monday,” O’Neil said. “To say that someone would rather go to the beach than go to work is one thing, but to actually say they’re disengaged at work is sort of troubling.”
Nationwide, the percentage of engaged employees has remained steady since 2000, according to Gallup, drifting between 26 percent and 30 percent each year over that time.
