The findings from Gallup, were shared by the management consultants APAC MD Claire de Carteret, during a discussion panel Lifting Productivity Without Burning Out Our People at The Cuppa Co-Lab in Sydney last week.
Employee engagement across Australia and New Zealand sat at 21%, meaning just over one in five workers feel energised, connected and productive at work.
Alongside that bleak finding, EnterpriseWorks founder Darren Moglia, revealed research on workplace productivity, which found the average Australian organisation now uses approximately 305 systems, with only 16% centrally managed.
Nearly half the working week, 45%, is spent in meetings, yet less than half of those meetings are believed to move meaningful work forward.
Meanwhile, 42% of employees spend significant time on manual reporting, rising to 62% among senior leaders.
The research also found a persistent gap between strategy and execution: while 83% of employees understand their organisation’s strategy, only 51% believe their day-to-day work is actually connected to it.
The discussion, host by Cuppa.tv founder Luke Cook, also featured Medibank’s hub lead for people partnering, Pam Gavan, and Taylor Dee Hawkins from Foundations for Tomorrow.
Together warning from the panel was that AI is not a fix for poorly designed work. While it can amplify performance, in an organisation with fragmented systems and unclear accountability, it risks accelerating complexity rather than removing it.
“The biggest risk is not that AI will take our jobs. The biggest risk is that we’ve lost our capacity for growth, our people are burning out, and we get left behind on the AI opportunity,” Moglia said.
While manager capability is one of the fastest levers for change, the fact that just 25% of managers strongly agrees they have been adequately trained for the demands of their role, which now includes performance, wellbeing, psychosocial risk, AI adoption and change leadership, there’s a clear vacuum at every level of business.
Gavan shared practical outcomes from Medibank’s Work Reinvented program, including the removal of low-value approval processes, reorganising teams around customer outcomes rather than functional silos, and using employee insight to identify friction points. It led to initiatives including a four-day workweek model in some parts of the business.
Immediate steps an organisation can take, include asking employees closest to the work what creates frustration and what adds time but little value; clarifying the three most valuable priorities each employee should focus on daily; replacing unnecessary meetings with a clearer operating cadence; equipping managers to hold one meaningful coaching conversation per team member each week; and simplifying systems before introducing further technology.
Luke Cook said it was the kind of conversation Cuppa excels at – bringing people together to talk openly about the things that actually shape how work gets done.
“What struck me most about this conversation was how quickly the room moved past the usual productivity talking points of more tools, more hours, more pressure and into something more honest,” he said.
“When you get CEOs and senior leaders speaking candidly with each other, rather than presenting to each other, you get to the real issue faster: organisations have normalised complexity that nobody signed up for.”
The full conversation can be viewed here.
