Employee engagement has dropped to a 10-year low of 31% in the United States, with 17% of workers actively disengaged, according to a January 2025 Gallup report. Following the Great Resignation, this period is being called The Great Detachment. It is marked by workers staying in roles that are not engaging their interest and passion, simply because they feel they have no choice.
If you’re an HR leader, you already know this has adverse effects throughout an organization. This means that many HR professionals are currently putting their focus on how to keep employees motivated, aligned with company goals, and actively contributing to their organization’s success.
Here we’ll look at the real impact of engagement on your organizational success, and outline nine actionable strategies for improving it in your company.
Key Takeaways
- Employee engagement is at a 10-year low. This is having a real impact on all businesses. However, there are actions that can be taken to help improve employee engagement in companies of all sizes.
- Employee engagement includes a sense of commitment, identifying with a company, job satisfaction and high energy levels at work.
- Strategy One: Create a value-driven mission statement to help employees understand how their work fuels the company mission.
- Strategy Two: Reward employees by giving them tasks they enjoy more often, and involve them in goal-setting, which lowers stress levels.
- Strategy Three: Set weekly expectations to accommodate agile work processes and discuss them together.
- Strategy Four: Assess and adjust your workplace culture, including leadership styles, inclusivity and other factors that play a role in engagement.
- Strategy Five: Assess whether remote, hybrid and in-office requirements are impacting engagement and adjust accordingly.
- Strategy Six: Encourage managers to give employees daily feedback and have thoughtful conversations.
- Strategy Seven: Be transparent about how employees will fit into future company plans, to help them feel secure.
- Strategy Eight: Listen to your employees’ input and find out what they have to say about key drivers of engagement, like job satisfaction.
- Strategy Nine: Support your managers with the right training, opportunities, and performance management software to keep them motivated and engaged.
Table of Contents
1. Employee Engagement Has a Real Impact on Your Business
2. The Basics: The Anatomy of Employee Engagement
3. 9 Practical Strategies for Improving Employee Engagement
4. Performance Management Software Helps HR Professionals Boost Engagement
Employee Engagement Has a Real Impact on Your Business
Low employee engagement has grown prevalent across industries and companies of all sizes. Here’s why it matters:
- Low employee engagement levels dramatically affect both team performance and the entire organization.
- Absences from work also increase with lack of engagement.
- Disengaged employees are likely to look for a new job or simply quit.
- According to the SHRM, safety incidents can increase when engagement drops.
On the other hand, engaged employees identify strongly with their work and have high levels of energy, write A. M. Saks and J. A. Gruman in an article published in Human Resource Development Quarterly. They go on to identify a so-called engagement gap that is “costing U.S. businesses billions of dollars a year in lost productivity.”
According to Gallup, the following factors are responsible for the current drop in engagement:
- Unclear expectations
- Lack of connection to the company’s purpose
- Perceived lack of growth opportunities
- Inability to leverage their strengths
- Feeling like their boss or colleagues aren’t concerned about their wellbeing
To address the lack of employee engagement, organizations need to confront these challenges head-on.
The Basics: The Anatomy of Employee Engagement
Employee engagement includes four key elements:
- A sense of commitment to a company
- Strong identification with a company
- Satisfaction with a job
- A high level of energy at work
Organizational success hinges on these four components of engagement. Each of them is crucial for fostering a productive workplace that keeps driving toward more ambitious goals.
9 Practical Strategies for Improving Employee Engagement
In a report published by the American Psychological Association, Gruman and Saks describe three core methods that are at the heart of all employee engagement improvement strategies:
- Increase the psychological meaningfulness of their work. This refers to one’s sense of feeling valuable in their role and able to contribute in a significant way.
- Ensure psychological safety. This entails trusting their team and manager, which allows them to express their ideas and fully participate at work without fearing that negative consequences for their career, identity, or status may result.
- Promote psychological availability—employees’ readiness to engage in their work or sense of confidence about doing so. Levels of physical or emotional energy, security, and worries about outside demands can all affect psychological availability. Research published by the National Library of Medicine define it as “the sense of having the physical, emotional, or psychological resources to personally engage at a particular moment.”
To put these into action, we recommend the following:
1. Create a Value-Driven Mission Statement
Reframe your mission to match employees’ priorities. If you aim to become the industry leader, great—but how will that positively impact society? If you can create a more value-driven mission statement, it will resonate more strongly with employees.
Then, help employees understand how their work furthers that mission. This will help them identify with the company and its purpose.
2. Centre Intrinsic Motivations
Talk with employees about which elements of their work they find most rewarding. If they can do tasks they enjoy more often, they’ll gain intrinsic rewards from their work, the HBR researchers assert. In turn, you’ll have more motivated employees.
Stress will drop as they handle tasks that leverage their strengths and interests, too. Redesign roles and responsibilities to fit employee interests whenever possible. And involve them in setting their own goals rather than just pursuing goals set for them, which can greatly boost their engagement in their role.
3. Set Weekly Expectations
In today’s agile environment, priorities can shift week by week. Urgent situations come up. Don’t assume that the expectations you set for the quarter are still relevant. Lack of clear expectations causes employees to quickly disengage.
Instead, set expectations on a weekly basis. Managers can discuss expectations with employees on Friday afternoons, for instance. Then, at the start of the new week, they can check in with them to reaffirm weekly goals.
4. Redesign Your Culture
Compare your desired culture with your current one. Consider how workplace environment, leadership styles, and inclusivity all factor in. Reflect on your leadership values and talk about them as a team. Then find ways to live them, like agreeing not to send emails after 6 p.m.
5. Allow for Hybrid Work
Engagement has dropped most among on-site employees who could work remotely but are required to be in the office. You might want to rethink your return-to-office mandate, if applicable. Or, consider implementing a hybrid arrangement if you haven’t already.
Create a clear schedule for in-office and remote work, too. Clarify which days people can come to the office for collaboration. This will spark both spontaneous and planned group work and brainstorming sessions.
6. Provide Daily Feedback
Encourage managers to give employees daily feedback. Remote tools for sharing input can help. Make sure they’re holding at least one in-depth conversation per week with each employee, too.
7. Discuss How Employees Fit into Future Plans
Be transparent about how employees will fit into future plans. Transparency about the future brings a sense of security, reports the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). A Quantum Workplace study found this to be a key driver of engagement.
8. Listen to Your Employees
Roll out a strategy for listening to employees’ input to understand how employees view their company and culture. You’ll gain insights into the drivers of engagement, like job satisfaction. When you listen to employees and take action on their input, you’ll help them feel more empowered and engaged.
9. Support Your Managers
According to the 2025 Gallup State of the Global Workplace report, manager engagement fell to 27% in 2024, making managers one of the most disengaged groups of workers. If managers feel disengaged, it’s almost impossible for their teams to be engaged. We recommend a special approach when it comes to motivating your leaders and helping managers overcome their own engagement challenges.
Give Managers the Right Tools
Empowering managers with goal-tracking software and similar digital tools can be a game-changer for their engagement, especially as they navigate the constant pressure of modern workplace disruptions. By automating progress updates and streamlining the feedback process, these resources alleviate the heavy burden of administrative busy work and allow them to stay aligned with their teams.
Hold Group Workshops Just for Managers
It can also help to plan workshops for managers that support their specific needs for professional development. These trainings provide an opportunity to connect with a cohort of peers who are dealing with the same issues. Together, they can discuss how they handle various issues, get fresh ideas and build morale together, leading to stronger engagement.
Offer Chances for Managers to Level Up
Let managers use their strategic thinking skills and make real progress in their roles. This will keep them driven to excel, knowing they have a pathway forward. It can also help to give managers the chance to connect with leaders above them. They’ll benefit greatly from their mentorship, guidance, and encouragement—and they’ll feel more valued at work.
Performance Management Software Helps HR Professionals Boost Engagement
Primalogik’s performance management software makes it easy to collect engagement data, manage goals and communicate in real-time with employees at all levels.
You can gauge engagement levels with employee surveys, use customizable 360 degree review questionnaires to uncover feedback that impacts engagement, and tailor your rating scales to align with how you measure success.At Primalogik, we believe that happy employees make for successful companies, regardless of whether you are a startup, small business or mid-sized company. Let us help you boost engagement with our award-winning software. Book a free demo today!