http://www.sltrib.com/news/2307747-155/utah-has-high-percentage-of-disengaged

Maybe it's due to bosses who just want employees to bow their heads and say yes. The Boner.

but ... but ... but Utah is a "right to work" state.

Not one bit surprised. I'd be disengaged too. If you knew the ax could be dropped at any moment for no reason, why put yourself out there? To top it off, you're probably underpaid and then have to give 10% or more to the church if you want to keep your job.

That's just the beginning. How many are on anti depressants so they can shut down and not feel anything? How many are going from work to church, and then back to work? How many have crazy making marriages?

Utah isn't someplace I would want to live, work, love, and make a life. Just my opinion

Exactly.
It is pretty hard to be engaged when you are underpaid AND under-appreciated. You may start out that way, but after being taken for granted for so long you just give up. They can always hire some BYU student or recent graduate in your place. And, they will...or their new favorite ward member, or whatever. They will push you out and you will be starting over...and over...again....

my experience was different. Grew up in So Calif, college grad, single in my 30s still living with roommates. Couldn't afford much. Then I moved to Utah. immediately I was able to afford a new home on my own, bought a new truck, jet skis and mountain bike on 2/3rd the salary of what I was making in Calif. For me, Utah was the land of opportunity, still is. Sorry so many feel disengaged.

Yay Jimmy!
As a transplant myself, I'm glad you stuck up for Utah! Great place if you're not LDS

When we lived in Utah for a year in the 70s we thought it was beautiful, and also affordable for poor student types. My husand had a job on a grant at the U of U computer graphics department. We had a todler and I was pregnant again when we left. Coming from the east coast I had never seen real mountains before, and standing in downtown Salt Lake and just looking up and seeing all that magnificent scenery was amazing.We liked everything but the Mormon control of every aspect of life, and could not see raising kids there at that time. We are nevermos but saw how they controlled the schools, sports, scouts etc. It just seemed unfair to expose kids to that constant pressure.

One of my sons went back to Utah with a buddy when they graduated from high school and lived in Park City for a year and had lots of fun and too much beer. He is into all kinds of outdoor sports so it was perfect, but he also returned home to NJ to find work. He ended up in CA which was a much better fit, and has beaches.

That makes it a good environment for someone who has become well-educated and is eager to perform and excel. Less competition, more slugs and losers to contrast yourself against, right?

Yeah, kind of. If I have to guess at why Utah workers are "disengaged," I would say the attitude of managers and owners has a lot to do with it. Utah is very entreprenuiral, but many owners and managers, especially younger ones, think of workers as pieces of furniture or something and resent even the most minimal labor laws. And investors can be predatory as well, so owning a business isn't necessarily the solution.

I just read a unemployment insurance law case. It involved one of the many of the Utah faux-contractors. Utah companies pretend their employees are "independent contractors" even though legally they're not, so the employer doesn't have to match FICA or medicare, nor pay unemployment insurance premiums. This forces the employee to pay 100% of their payroll taxes, contrary to law, and it leaves the employee wholly unprotected when they're laid off.

In this particular case, a business owner's got a neighbor who's a fulltime teacher. The business owner persuades the teacher to come work for him. She does, and the owner sets her up in a home office, calls her--and all her co-workers--independent contractors, provides her with software and procedures, and she becomes basically a sales-rep for a website/marketing company. She works for around four years, then receives a chirpy email telling her how wonderful she is, but the business hasn't got enough clients to keep her employed, so the company's regretfully letting her go, but if business picks up, she can come back, oh, and would she mind hanging around for another two weeks on an as-needed basis to help them out tying up loose ends?

In the middle of the two weeks, the company locks her out, and she applies for unemployment benefits because she's been laid off. Then Whoa, Nelly! The company fights back against her claim. And I mean fights back hard! The company loses two separate decisions. Unemployment determines, by the way she works, that she's not a contractor, she's an employee (and it's obvious what the company's trying to do to circumvent the law). Unemployment also determines, by the letter alone, that she was laid off. The company loses at the Division level, it loses at the Board level, but it takes the case to the appellate court, and loses there.

But the slander this woman had to endure from her employer in order to get unemployment benefits! This guy, this neighbor, who approached her to give her a job, and convinces her to take it, attacks her in order to win a court case and deny her a cushion to pay her mortgage and buy groceries after he lays her off! The employer fought hard to perserve the phony contractor status then fought hard to prove that she was fired for cause. The company's position was that most of the entire four or so years she worked for the company she was a thorn in their side, on the verge of being fired. They reached back two years to some incident to find something she'd done wrong. Then they had to build a case forward to explain why there was not one official bad report or performance evaluation documenting "cause." Without any documentation, or a history of work deficieny, the company went for straight slander against her. Suddenly the woman hears all this evidence from her employer about how she's been a crap employee and has been hated for four years! I can't imagine the stress that woman was under being slandered and bad-mouthed like that. The company even gathered witnesses to slander her too.

And this was in an open and shut case that lost in a summary fashion, in three courts. Yet the company fought every single point in order to avoid paying the unemployment insurance premiums every honest business person pays.

Yeah, Utah's workers are disengaged. Do you want to be torn apart by your neighbor after working for him for four years?

Of all the jobs I had all the years I worked in Utah, I only once had a job where I didn't wish every day that I worked somewhere else. And even though I was still mormon most of that time, the one job that I liked was one where the partners in the firm were both totally jack mormons. And maybe I liked my co-workers so much because super brainwashed TBMs would never last very long because they lived in Utah County so they didn't have to work for anyone who was not one of the pod people. In fact two of my co-workers from there are half of the mormon friends I have left.

Alas, I had to look for a higher paying job and left. I eventually moved to the Southeast and have been extremely happy in my job and have thoroughly enjoyed almost all of my co-workers. There's a lot to be said for working where there's diversity.

I am surprised the rate of "disengagement" isn't higher across the nation. How many rounds of layoffs do you have to witness before you realize that working hard only benefits the company and not the employee? Its not universal, but I have witnessed a whole lot of really hard workers get shown the door because the company needs to make "cut backs". In the end, the "job creators" are only interested in their own financial well being, and if they can make more money by outsourcing your job to India working yourself to the edge of death wont save you.

To me, in this climate you need to learn to work smart, not hard. That means being able to recognize when working hard will benefit you directly, and when it wont. If it wont, being "disengaged" and spending your time refreshing your skills and then looking for a new job is the smart play.

Younger workers have no idea what it was like in the old days. For my father's generation (WWII, the "Greatest Generation,") employers were *ashamed* to lay off employees. It was considered to be a failure. There was a much greater sense of responsibility toward employees. You could earn a living wage on one salary alone.

It could also be that they only feel they can express their disengagement on the "test" not to HR or their boss. I live in another of the light blue states on the map, and while I know my co-workers are actively disengaged, but no one will say it out loud, it might land them on the next lay off list.

We do the silly survey once a year, HR tell us to fix stuff and then provide no time or resources to work with. The next year the scores get worse and the cycle begins. The new plan is to penalize management bonuses for low engagement scores. Still not resources to fix the problems, but another way to save money.

Over the last 8 years I have seen a ton of my friends shown the door as we lay people off to meet budget needs. I now just keep my head down and hope I can hang on to retirement.

In my job, we are required to fill out a survey about how things are going in our particular school. The results form a part of our evaluation. So yeah, everything is "great." :/

I HATED working in Utah. The employers I worked for were users. And I worked for companies where lazy-ass managers (IHC) sat around and BS'd most of the day, while their secretaries and assistants (all female) worked their butts off doing what the men should have been doing. And those women were paid a pittance of what the men made.

I also worked for a company in a specialized field, where the lazy-ass owner played golf 3 afternoons a week. I, on the other hand, had to work both my job and part of his. When his slothful ness started costing him accounts, he hired an attorney to draw non-compete documents against me because he was going to cut my salary, and if I quit, he wanted to prevent me from working anywhere else in the same field. I had to quit without signing them.

I read your description and wondered if you worked for the mormon church. What do the men at the top really do? They certainly don't take responsibility for anything.

I know Cache valley pretty well. And it's a horrible place. The university has brought a lot of problems to this once upon a time agrarian community. There are so many minimum wage retail/restaurant jobs everywhere. It has some of the lowest unemployment anywhere in the nation. There are so many Walmart jobs, star bucks, kfc kind of jobs. So if your into poverty and busting your ass for pittance come to Cache Valley!

What's really hard is when people work 35 hours a week and still have to get government assistance to be able to survive. It's like what's the point of working? It's humiliating.