Editorial
It’s not your fault. The Employee Experience playbook just isn’t working.
Despite billions invested in various initiatives, millions of engagement surveys, recognition platforms and wellness programs, a stark reality persists — employee engagement levels have remained flat over the past five years.
According to Gallup's ongoing research, engagement hovers around 21% globally, barely budging from where it stood in 2019. This stagnation is a warning signal that our fundamental approach to employee experience needs a complete overhaul.
The Engagement Paradox: Why Nothing Has Changed
The persistence of low engagement reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what truly drives human connection at work.
Organizations have been treating engagement as a tactical problem rather than a strategic imperative rooted in human psychology and organizational design. We have forgotten that the sum total of all of the experiences an employee has at their company drives engagement. For engagement to go up, you can’t just focus on programs to make people feel good. You need to focus on experiences — how employees interact with everything from systems, to processes, policies, communication styles, team dynamics, value alignment. When those experiences are positive, engagement goes up.
Challenge #1: The Program Trap
Most companies have fallen into the "program trap," launching initiative after initiative without addressing the underlying systemic issues. They've invested heavily in surface-level solutions: casual Fridays, employee appreciation days, digital wellness apps.
While these efforts demonstrate good intentions, they fail to address the deeper needs that drive authentic engagement: autonomy, purpose, mastery and genuine belonging.
Challenge #2: Overreliance on Dated Feedback
The traditional engagement playbook relied heavily on employee surveys and reactive measures. By the time organizations receive feedback, analyze it and implement changes, the workplace context has already shifted. This lag creates a perpetual cycle of chasing symptoms rather than addressing root causes.
Challenge #3: Mismatched Strategies
Many engagement strategies have been designed by leadership teams who are naturally more engaged with their work. These leaders often project their motivations onto their workforce, creating programs that miss the mark for frontline employees, remote workers and mid-level managers who make up the majority of most organizations.
With AI, uncertain markets and tariffs, the pace of change itself has become a significant factor. Organizations are operating in a constant adaptation mode, with strategies, priorities and structures shifting rapidly. This perpetual state of flux makes it difficult for organizations to create employee programs that demonstrate a clear ROI, and employees are losing trust that employers have their best interests at heart.
New Playbook Rule #1: Lead with Humanity
The path to meaningful employee connection in today's marketplace requires abandoning the old tactics-first playbook entirely and embracing a more sophisticated understanding of human motivation and organizational dynamics.
Change #1: Design for Psychological Safety First
Rather than focusing on engagement programs, organizations must create environments where employees feel psychologically safe to contribute their best thinking, take risks and be vulnerable.
With Gallup reporting trust in leadership is at an all time low, this means training managers not only in performance management, but also in emotional intelligence, active listening and creating inclusive team dynamics. It requires establishing clear communication norms that prioritize transparency and encourage healthy feedback loops and conversations. Managers and leaders need to be authentic and transparent CONSISTENTLY.
Change #2: Create Opportunities for Micro-Connections
Our fragmented work environments require organizations to intentionally create opportunities for micro-connections — those brief but meaningful interactions that build relationship equity over time. This might include structured peer mentoring programs, cross-functional project rotations or even simple protocols for beginning meetings with personal check-ins.
The goal is to weave human connection into the fabric of daily work rather than relegating it to special events or programs. This is not about mandated time in office, but rather, being highly intentional about connecting.
Change #3: Reimagine Work and Demonstrate Impact
Employees need to see clear connections between their daily work and business outcomes. Mission statements and company values posters won’t cut it.
Organizations must create transparent systems that demonstrate how individual contributions connect to team goals, customer outcomes and broader impact. This might include customer story sharing, impact dashboards or town halls where leaders showcase the real-world effects of employees’ work.
Creating these connections also requires rethinking how work is done. Organizations need to determine what tasks be done asynchronously and which require real-time collaboration. It also means using people analytics to understand team dynamics and identify challenging managers.
Change #4: Personalize Growth and Development
One-size-fits-all development programs fail to engage the varying career aspirations, learning styles and life circumstances of a diverse workforce.
The new playbook requires creating multiple pathways for growth, including lateral skill development, project-based learning and stretch assignments that don't necessarily follow traditional hierarchical progression. This multi-pronged approach recognizes that feeling challenged and supported in personally meaningful ways increases engagement.
New Playbook Rule #2: Recognize and Clarify the Technology Impact
AI is reshaping employee interactions with work through automation of routine tasks, intelligent scheduling systems and personalized learning platforms. Many employees are reducing their administrative burden, which theoretically should free them up for more meaningful work.
However, this transition can create anxiety about job security and requires new skills. Mismanaging these two elements can decrease engagement. In fact, 77% of employees report AI tools have increased their workload due to additional monitoring, testing outcomes and receiving more work due to AI implementation, according to Upwork research.
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AI could be transformative in solving some of the core issues:
Personalization at Scale
AI can help create truly personalized development paths, career recommendations and work assignments based on individual strengths, interests and goals — something impossible to do manually across large organizations.
New manager tools can track employee strengths, energy and allow teams to pick up on potential disengagement before it happens.
Manager Support
AI coaching tools could help managers become better at the human skills that drive engagement, through real-time feedback on communication patterns, check-in question suggestions or proactive identification of team members who need additional support.
Connection Facilitation
AI could intelligently match employees for mentoring, suggest collaboration opportunities based on complementary skills or help remote workers find the right moments to connect with colleagues across time zones.
Predictive Intervention
Rather than waiting for annual surveys, AI can identify engagement risks in real-time based on behavior, sentiment and tone and suggest interventions before problems escalate.
Will These New Playbooks Work?
The answer is yes. But it requires the courage to abandon comfortable assumptions about what drives engagement. Organizations that recognize engagement is an outcome of good organizational design rather than a problem to be solved with programs will succeed in building meaningful employee connections.
This means we have to make strategic choices about how work is done and redefine the workplace as a collaborative place to gather, strategize and work rather than endless video calls. It also means investing in manager development as a strategic priority, and measuring success through relationship quality rather than just participation rates in company initiatives.
We have to accept that authentic engagement cannot be manufactured through top-down initiatives but by creating environments that respect how we think and behave, and the fundamental need to contribute to something meaningful.
Companies that master this new playbook will solve their engagement challenges and gain a significant competitive advantage in attracting and retaining the top talent needed in today’s complex business environment.
The question is not whether employee connection can be saved, but whether organizations have the willingness and commitment to evolve beyond the strategies that got them into this predicament in the first place.
Editor's Note: Read more about the state of employee experience in 2025:
- How to Break Free From the Employee Experience Trap — If your company's employee experience looks good on paper but doesn't deliver the results you want, you may have fallen into the employee experience trap.
- Creating Exceptional Employee Experiences: Where HR, Communications and Technology Unite — Employee experiences cross departmental boundaries. So to create exceptional EX, multiple departments must work together – with internal comms in the lead.
- Leadership at a Crossroads: Thriving Through Change in 2025 — The pressure to invest in technological innovations might lead you to believe it should come at the expense of workforce investments. That's a false dichotomy.
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