Companies Are Spending More on Employee Engagement Than Ever. Gallup Says It’s Getting Worse. Here’s Why.

Global Employee Engagement Just Hit a Five-Year Low. The Problem Isn’t Awareness — It’s the Absence of a System.

The Number That Should Be Keeping Every Leader Up at Night

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report contains a finding that deserves far more attention than it has received. Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025 — the lowest level since 2020. According to a recent analysis drawing on Gallup’s data, the decline is happening despite years of increased investment in employee experience programs, wellbeing initiatives, and culture campaigns.

Let me make sure that number is landing with the weight it deserves. Only one in five employees globally is genuinely engaged at work. The other four are either going through the motions or, in the case of actively disengaged employees, working against the organization. And this is happening in 2026 — after the industry has spent years talking about employee experience, after the Great Resignation forced organizations to take culture seriously, after “people are our most important asset” has become perhaps the most repeated phrase in corporate communications.

More investment. More programs. More language about putting people first. Fewer engaged employees.

The question worth asking is not whether this is surprising. It is why it is happening — and what actually works instead.

Why Engagement Initiatives Keep Failing

Here is the pattern I have seen play out in organization after organization, across every industry, at every scale. A company identifies an engagement problem — through a survey, through turnover data, through a visible culture crisis. Leadership responds with an initiative. Sometimes it is a new benefits program. Sometimes it is a town hall series. Sometimes it is a culture deck. Sometimes it is a well-intentioned off-site where everyone generates values statements on Post-it notes.

The initiative runs. Engagement scores tick up slightly in the next survey. Eighteen months later, they are back where they started or lower. The cycle repeats.

This happens because engagement initiatives treat the symptom rather than the cause. The symptom is that employees do not feel connected, valued, or clear about their purpose. The cause is that the organization has never built the daily systems that create connection, value, and purpose consistently — not just during a program launch, but in every interaction, on every shift, with every manager, in every conversation between a leader and the people they are responsible for.

The research I find most clarifying on this comes from the same culture-first analysis drawing on Gallup: a culture-first employee experience is not built through a campaign. It is built through thousands of moments — a manager who listens, a leader who explains the truth, a team that makes space for learning, a company that helps people grow while the world of work keeps changing. Those moments do not happen reliably through good intentions. They happen through design.

“The ‘Great Resignation,’ ‘Quiet Quitting,’ and ‘Cancel Culture’ are not indictments on employees, but rather, business leaders’ lack of focus on truly caring for the people who are under their command.”  — John DiJulius, The Employee Experience Revolution

What “Design” Actually Means in Practice

When I say the solution to the engagement crisis is design rather than initiatives, I want to be specific about what that means, because “build a better culture” is not an action plan.

In my work, designed engagement looks like two things working together.

The Employee Experience Model: T.E.E.M.

The Employee Experience Model (T.E.E.M.) guides organizations through every stage of an employee’s journey — from the moment someone accepts an offer through their first day, their first 90 days, their first year, and into long-term development. Each stage has specific, intentional actions designed to build connection, clarity, and commitment. Not once. Consistently, as a system.

The Gallup data on what drives engagement is clear: employees need to know what is expected of them, have what they need to do their work well, have opportunities to do what they do best, receive regular recognition, and believe that someone at work cares about them as a person. Every one of those drivers can be systematized. They do not require extraordinary managers or unlimited budgets. They require specific, trained behaviors executed consistently at every stage of the employee’s experience.

The T.E.E.M. is the architecture for doing exactly that. It takes the aspirational language of “we value our people” and converts it into the specific moments — the check-in on day 30, the development conversation at month six, the recognition behavior that happens weekly rather than annually — that determine whether an employee feels it.

Never & Always Standards for Leaders

The second piece of the design is defining what I call Never & Always standards for leadership behavior — the specific, non-negotiable ways that managers and leaders show up with their teams, regardless of how busy they are, how stressful the quarter is, or how much organizational turbulence is happening above them.

The reason engagement varies so dramatically within a single organization is almost always the manager. Gallup has documented this for decades: the manager accounts for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores. Not the company’s benefits. Not the CEO’s vision. The specific behaviors of the direct manager in the daily interactions that make up an employee’s experience of working there.

Never & Always standards for leaders might include: always know what each team member is working on and what is getting in their way. Never let a week pass without a one-on-one conversation that is genuinely about the person, not just the work. Always be the first to acknowledge when a team member does something well. Never allow a new team member to reach day 60 without a deliberate check-in on whether they feel connected to the team and the purpose.

These are not aspirations. They are standards. They are trainable, observable, and accountable. And when they become the expected behavior of every leader at every level — not just the ones who are naturally good at it — engagement stops being a program outcome and starts being an organizational outcome.

The Engagement Number That Actually Matters

Gallup’s 20% global engagement figure is a measure of outcome. It tells you where organizations are landing. It does not tell you how to get somewhere different.

What I have seen in the organizations that consistently land above the average — the ones whose engagement scores hold steady even through layoffs, leadership changes, and economic uncertainty — is not a better set of initiatives. It is a better set of systems. Systems that make connection and clarity and recognition the default behavior of the organization, rather than the result of a particularly good manager or a particularly well-funded HR team.

The U.S. business community has now spent more than a decade talking about employee experience. Gallup’s 2026 data suggests that talking about it has not been enough. The organizations that will close the gap are the ones that stop designing programs and start designing systems. The ones that ask not “what is our next engagement initiative?” but “what are the daily behaviors and structures that make engagement the natural outcome of working here?”

That shift in question is the difference between another engagement campaign and an actual culture.

“A good customer experience starts with a good employee experience. The CX will never be better than the EX.”  — John DiJulius

Ready to Build the System That Actually Moves Your Engagement Numbers?

If your organization has tried programs, surveys, and initiatives — and the needle is not moving — my team can help you build the systems that make engagement the daily outcome of how your leaders behave and how your culture is designed. Let’s talk.

→  Schedule a Complimentary Strategy Call  — Let’s look at your engagement data and build the system to change it

→  Explore the Employee Experience Model (T.E.E.M.)  — The stage-by-stage framework that makes engagement a system, not a campaign

→  Read: Never & Always — Non-Negotiable Culture Standards  — Define the specific leader behaviors that drive engagement consistently

→  Get The Employee Experience Revolution  — The book that explains why initiatives fail and systems win

→  Join the Employee Experience Executive Academy (EXEA)  — 12 months of building the systems that actually move engagement numbers

→  Listen: Episode 163 — Creating a New Employee Onboarding Experience  — One of the highest-leverage stages for designing engagement in from day one

→  Explore the X-Commandment Methodology  — The full framework for world-class internal culture

→  Book John as a Keynote Speaker  — Bring the engagement systems conversation to your next leadership event