Feature
Employee engagement has been nothing if not reliable. Prior to 2024, 12 of the last 13 years saw engagement improve year over year. That single blip? It was in 2020 when, as you may recall, a global pandemic upended literally everything at work.
That’s what makes Gallup’s April 23 report so striking: in 2024, global engagement dropped to 21%. That dip in engagement is happening again, but this time without a singular, external crisis to blame.
Earlier in 2025, Gallup reported that U.S. employee engagement hit its lowest point in a decade, down to 31%. Perhaps more concerningly, 17% of U.S. workers are actively disengaged. That’s less of a passive slide into malaise and more of a deliberate withdrawal. These are people who no longer believe in the work or the system surrounding it.
The lack of engagement has a cost, with Gallup estimating $438 billion in productivity losses and countless individual problems for organizations. So why does this drop barely register outside HR circles?
It’s Not All About Internal Control
Organizations don’t operate in a vacuum, and that has to account for at least some of the feelings of disengagement.
There are general macroeconomic headwinds no corporate leadership team can control: global instability, political strife, trade wars, budget tightening and workforce turnover all matter. Disruption has become the default operating mode and it wears on employees.
These are the conditions that everyone has to operate in and they aren’t necessarily new. While external shocks may spark decline, internal choices determine whether it becomes a trend.
The canary in the coal mine is the disengagement among managers and leaders on the front lines.
We need managers to be engaged because 70% of team engagement is directly tied to the manager’s own engagement. But managers are bearing the brunt of disengagement. Their engagement dropped from 30% in 2023 to 27% in 2024. Among younger managers and women, the drop was even steeper, which raises significant concerns about the future diversity of senior leadership within organizations.
It’s a problem that’s bigger than managers, though.
RTO, Culture and Tech Challenge Engagement
Too many leaders still treat employee engagement like an individual attitude problem instead of a warning about systemic failure. Organizations have done enough of their own damage to drop engagement scores across the board across three key areas, though.
1. The Return-to-Office (RTO) Fallout
Many companies are pushing employees back into offices under the banner of culture or collaboration. But the numbers say otherwise: fully remote workers report 29% engagement, while fully on-site workers trail at just 20%. Hybrid workers land in between. Flexibility is an easy engagement driver to have (or lose).
The insistence on RTO signals distrust more than it fosters connection. It punishes high performers for thriving outside the office while forcing everyone back into spaces that often lack purpose, cohesion or decent tech. That’s not to mention the added expense and time away from home.
2. The Culture Compromise
Employee trust in senior leadership is fading fast. In one UK study in 2024, only 56% of workers believed their leaders made a genuine effort to listen, which is down from 65% the year before. Belief in leadership vision has also cratered. Culture, once touted as a differentiator, is now too often sacrificed for speed, savings, or short-term efficiency.
The consequences are structural: When people don’t know where the company is going, and don’t trust who’s at the helm, engagement follows a natural path aligned with declining trust.
3. The Tech Gutting the Experience
AI and digital tools were supposed to augment human work. Instead, too many are being used to manage it out of existence. Surveillance tools, robotic workflows and engagement platforms that treat sentiment like a data point erode the employee experience instead of improving it.
Even engagement tech itself has backfired in some organizations: dashboards that collect feedback but never act on it, pulse surveys with no follow-through, or chatbots that simulate listening.
These tools were built to amplify and improve culture. Deployed poorly, they just scale disconnection.
Disengagement Is a Signal
It’s tempting to interpret disengagement as a motivational deficit or individual manager malpractice. It’s easy to assign blame to things out of your control or due to temporary conditions that will soon be resolved.
It isn’t that simple.
Instead, a decline in employee engagement should be seen as a rational and natural response to systems that no longer serve the people inside them.
Employees are over it. Over being micromanaged by metrics. Over being summoned back to outdated offices. Over watching meaningful work get fragmented by workflows designed more for tracking than impact. Their disengagement is feedback.
Conference
Oct
20
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
When engagement drops as sharply as it has, especially in the absence of a clear external crisis like a recession, there are probably systemic issues. The problem isn’t that workers don’t care. It’s that the systems they’re in don’t give them a reason.
What Needs to Change
Engagement is architecture, not a magic formula. Right now, many companies are building on a cracked foundation. So, where do organizations begin?
Start with the pressure valve: managers. They’ve been turned into catch-alls for culture, communication, productivity, and policy enforcement without the training or bandwidth to do any of it well. Only 44% of managers globally have received any formal leadership training. If 70% of engagement rides on their shoulders, that’s the real malpractice.
We have to end engagement theater, too. Stop the endless surveys with no action. Retire the internal campaigns that spotlight values employees haven’t felt in years. If engagement efforts don’t change how people work and feel day-to-day, they’re performative and your employees know it.
Finally, we have to rely on tech to amplify and augment our human-facing systems. AI can personalize learning, support career pathing and remove friction. But it can’t substitute for actual care. Use it to scale support, not sidestep it. Use data to improve systems, not to spy on people.
Engagement Still Matters
Engagement is a powerful signal and a clear differentiator. Companies with high engagement outperform their peers across retention, productivity and profitability. More important, it’s a signal and warning about your workforce.
But you can’t fix engagement by talking about it. You fix it by rebuilding the environment where it lives: trust, purpose, flexibility, clarity and care. If those are broken, no tool or program will save you.
Employees are asking for systems that don’t burn them out. Work that respects their time. Leadership they don’t have to second-guess. That’s the baseline.
If engagement is falling, it means something’s not working. That’s the point. It’s feedback. And it’s time to act on it.
Editor's Note: Read more advice on improving employee engagement:
- Employee Listening Is About Real Conversations, Not Vanity Metrics — It's a great paradox: the more emphasis leaders place on employee feedback scores, the less meaningful the scores become.
- CEOs Blame Work From Home for Company Failings. Here's Why They're Wrong — Work from home has become a scapegoat for all sorts of company shortcomings. Here's what those claims leave out.
- Engaged Employees Transform Customer Experience. Here's Why — An employee's energy directly influences how customers feel when they leave. While they might leave with a purchase, what they'll remember is the interaction.
