Burning building
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Authorities have charged an employee with arson after he allegedly set fire to a Kimberly-Clark warehouse, causing over $600 million in overall damages. Investigators allege he filmed himself setting the blaze, expressing anger over wages and corporate practices. Via a video uploaded to Facebook, he said, “If you’re not going to pay us enough to [expletive] live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this [expletive].”
This statement reflects a level of frustration leaders should not ignore. Gallup reports that global employee engagement has dropped to 20%—a figure that represents a workforce largely disconnected from their work. But disengaged employees don’t burn buildings to the ground; they largely do nothing.
It’s when disengagement turns into a more insidious emotion, such as active disgruntlement, that some employees can move to take destructive action. However, employee emotion in general may be a bit of a blind spot for CEOs. According to the Boston Consulting Group CEO Insomnia Index, only 37% of CEOs say they are concerned about rising levels of employee disgruntlement.
The BCG data reveals something deeper than indifference. It points to a structural blind spot, one where CEOs are not necessarily ignoring employee sentiment because they don’t care; rather, at least in part, it’s because leaders are consumed by immediate pressures. Hitting quarterly targets, managing costs and navigating board scrutiny are the tangible and visible pressures CEOs are busy managing.
Employee disgruntlement, by contrast, can be harder to see from the top. It builds slowly, often with no visible signs, until tensions boil over.
Employee engagement is often treated as a “soft” metric—important, but secondary to financial performance. That’s because the return on investment (ROI) for culture, well-being programs and other engagement factors is notoriously difficult to measure. In almost two decades of working with HR teams, I’ve learned that every budget conversation eventually comes down to a single question: what is the ROI? The truth is those people-oriented measures do not neatly translate into hard data. While not every company is going to have one employee deliver a $600 million complaint, low engagement does carry a price.
That same Gallup report estimates that low engagement costs the global economy $10 trillion in lost productivity each year. Which makes sense: Disengaged employees are less likely to go beyond what is explicitly required, less likely to collaborate effectively and far less likely to surface risks. In an environment where competitive advantage increasingly depends on speed, adaptability and discretionary effort, the negative effects of disengaged employees compound quickly.
But let’s go back to our alleged arsonist. According to the affidavit filed with the federal complaint, the employee made other statements that made his motive crystal clear. “I just cost these [expletive] billions,” “1% is a [expletive] joke,” and “All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”
Sentiment like that raises a harder question for leaders: what happens when employees feel that the economic equation is fundamentally stacked against them? The only way to get answers to questions like that is by listening. CEOs are often too far removed from the day-to-day experiences of employees, but making an effort to actually engage in dialogue at all levels of the business is a good start. Sometimes, a simple conversation can surface a problem and fix it at the source—before it escalates.
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