There is a dangerous chasm developing between employees and their organizations. You have read about it, and likely experienced it at your company. Employees are demanding more from their workplace, and managers, leaders, and overall organizations struggle to keep up with a challenging economic landscape and a seemingly capricious new workforce.
According to the GALLUP® 2025 Report on Employee Engagement, global Employee Engagement fell last year, contributing to nearly half a $Trillion$ dollars in lost productivity. Gallup surveys over 2.7 million workers across 100,000 teams in over 50 diverse industries globally.
Their findings:
- Individual contributor Engagement flatlined at 18%.
- In Canada and the US, the percentage of employees thriving has fallen to the lowest levels in over 15 years.
- US Engagement specifically at 31% has not been this low in over a decade.
- 20% of global employees report experiencing daily loneliness at work.
- Global Engagement dropped to 21% last year.
Consider the meaning of this statistic: it means that a staggering 79% of all our employees are not fully Engaged in their work. Not thriving, not trusting, not growing, not believing in the company in which they work.
Gallup goes on to estimate that higher engagement would result in 78% fewer absenteeism incidents, 63% fewer safety incidents, 17% higher productivity (sales) and 23% higher profitability.
This is the Engagement Disconnect.
It’s not as if organizations have had no access to answers!
- In the 1920’s human relations pioneers like Mary Parker Follett, who argued managers should pay attention to ‘the human element,’ and the Western Electric Hawthorne experiments (Baker Library/Bloomberg Centre Historical Collections), showed that when research paid attention to workers, productivity improved.
- In the 1950’s to 1960’s Herzberg’s two-factor theory began to differentiate between extrinsic and intrinsic motivating factors of employee success.
As far back as the 1920s, pioneers were already connecting worker well-being with performance. Mary van Kleeck studied labor conditions and dignity at work (VCU Social Welfare History Project). Henry S. Dennison argued that productivity depended on social and psychological factors, not just pay or machinery (ResearchGate, 2012). And most famously, Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne experiments (1924–1932) showed that belonging, recognition, and team dynamics significantly improved performance (Harvard Gazette).
Although Employee Engagement as a term has its roots as recently as the 1990’s, nearly 100 years of cumulative research and experimentation, analysis and study have given us a plethora of vital clues into what an ideal formula for employee success looks like.
So, we do we still drop the ball? Why do so many employees fall through the cracks?
It is because we have lacked way of sewing together all the disparate elements that DO WORK.
We have instead run pell-mell toward quick fixes and popular schemes that provide a brief uptick in Engagement but miss the long-term intention of the organization and the heart of the employee.
This must stop.
We must implement a system that works to improve and empower BOTH the employee and the organization.
For too long the employer/employee relationship has been a cruel tug-of-war.
This must stop.
Employee engagement and corporate success is not a zero-sum game.
Done right, employees will be empowered, challenged, confident, and have faith in their organizations as true custodians of their proud working lives.
Done right, organizations will flourish with growth, efficiency, profitability and be recognized for fostering a culture where workers win.
The Professional Jetpack provides that holistic, mutually-empowering system.
Feel free to ask questions, receive updates on the book’s pending release date, and learn more about winning at work!
