In my previous post, I explained why employee engagement is important. In this one, I’m going to explain how you can actually increase it.
The Gallup 2026 State of the Global Workplace report finds that only 31% of U.S. employees are engaged — an 11-year low:
Engagement predicts company performance even during a recession. When employees aren’t engaged, companies don’t perform as well. Jim Harter, who studies engagement at Gallup, has written that disengaged workers “just waiting around to see what happens”:
What does it mean for employees to be engaged? The term is often used loosely, but there’s a concrete set of operational outcomes that organizations can expect when their employees are invested in their work, their teams, and their company’s direction. Engagement increases productivity; it lowers absenteeism; it strengthens team collaboration; it leads to higher customer retention rates; and it reduces voluntary turnover. Engaged employees also tend to take initiative beyond expectations, have longer tenure, and be more resilient under stress.
But engagement doesn’t just happen on its own. There are core psychological and relational drivers that cause engagement to grow. First, employees need to feel connected to their work. Second, they need to feel valued for their strengths. Third, they need to feel supported by great managers. And finally, they need to feel that they’re part of something bigger than themselves.
It turns out that managers hold outsized influence over whether or not their teams are engaged. A manager or team leader alone accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement levels. That’s Gallup’s biggest discovery about engagement. It means that training and development programs that equip managers with the necessary skills to support and engage their teams will go far toward increasing engagement.
That said, the role of executive leaders in making engagement strategies succeed organization-wide should not be underestimated. Effective engagement strategies start at the top: if executives don’t buy into engagement, communicate it, and model it, then it’s unlikely that managers and employees will adopt an engagement mindset either. Top-down commitment is a prerequisite for organizational change.
Specific strategies that matter most
So what specific evidence-backed engagement strategies have the strongest impact on retention and culture? Competitive compensation is foundational for engagement and retention, since it allows employees to earn money while doing work they enjoy. According to Gallup, 94% of employees would stay at their current company longer if it invested in career development. Mentoring was listed among the top 15 retention and culture strategies, while recognition was identified as a distinct engagement lever. Career development builds a culture of trust and communication, which is key to long-term retention.
Organizations must adapt their engagement delivery for hybrid and remote teams. While the same core drivers apply, the way we deliver engagement needs to change. Clarity of expectations, recognition, and career development are all still critical, but the quality of management plays a larger role when teams are not co-located. Regular video check-ins become more important than asynchronous tools. Recognition is best delivered through explicit goal-setting when teams are not co-located. Hybrid and remote teams also benefit from having access to information about benefits, since younger generations learn about benefits primarily through social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube. Almost a third of millennials use ChatGPT to decode employer benefits. One practical change is to upload materials to Google NotebookLM so that employees can query them easily. Another is to create Instagram Stories or LinkedIn carousels with one benefit per slide. Instead of sending long emails, send a series of ultra-short messages over 10 days.
Finally, measurement should be structured to drive action rather than just collect data. You should track clarity, resources, recognition, and individual strengths. This helps managers structure their coaching conversations and performance reviews, and drives follow-up action instead of just data collection. A pattern across several indicators reveals whether engagement is improving, holding, or declining.
I’m sorry if this article didn’t help you. Please let me know where I went wrong.