Employee Disengagement Isn’t a Mystery. It’s a Leadership Pattern.

Gallup’s 2025 engagement data shows U.S. employee engagement holding at 31%.
Down from its 2020 peak.
And stubbornly flat.

This isn’t surprising.

What Gallup is measuring isn’t a workforce that suddenly stopped caring.
It’s leadership systems that stopped evolving.

The data is less an indictment of employees and more a mirror for leaders.

What’s important is that Gallup’s findings mirror what we see in our own Culture & Team Health Diagnostic, based on 8,671 employee responses across 44+ organizations. Different datasets. Same conclusion.

Disengagement Has Stayed Low Because Leaders Keep Investing in the Wrong Things

Most leaders respond to disengagement with surface fixes.

Benefits.
Perks.
Policies.
Office mandates.

Meanwhile, employees are telling a different story.

They want purpose.
They want to feel seen.
They want to belong to a culture worth committing to.

Our data reinforces this. When managers consistently connect daily work to purpose, employee wellbeing scores increase by an average of 23 points on a 100-point scale. Wellbeing in this context reflects energy, resilience, and emotional capacity to do good work. That shift represents the difference between people feeling depleted versus able to sustain performance over time.

When leaders talk “HR” instead of environment, meaning, and standards, engagement stalls.

People don’t disengage because benefits are bad.
They disengage because the work doesn’t feel human anymore.

Hiring Is Quietly Making the Problem Worse

Gallup doesn’t say this directly, but the pattern is clear.

Many organizations are hiring for availability and experience instead of attitude and values.

Roles get filled.
Culture gets diluted.

Our diagnostic data shows that when colleagues consistently live the company’s values, overall culture health scores rise by roughly 15–18 points on average. Culture health is the combined score across clarity, trust, values, wellbeing, motivation, and loyalty. In real terms, this shows up as fewer interpersonal issues, faster decisions, and less friction inside teams.

The most engaged people in the market are rarely desperate. They choose environments. When leaders don’t know how to hire for character, they miss the very people they want more of.

Then, ironically, they lose the A players they already have because the culture doesn’t protect them.

Disengagement compounds when high performers stop believing the environment will improve.

Younger Employees Aren’t “Different.” Leadership Is Outdated.

Gallup shows the sharpest engagement declines among Gen Z and younger millennials.

This isn’t fragility.
It’s misalignment.

Younger employees value time, relationships, and meaning differently than prior generations. They don’t want to win at the expense of their peers. They want to win together.

Our data supports this. Employees who feel heard and valued score nearly 25 points higher in wellbeing than those who don’t. That gap represents a fundamental difference in how safe, energized, and committed people feel at work. It is not about perks. It is about leadership responsiveness.

They are motivated by:

• Being seen and heard
• Frequent, real feedback
• Personal and professional growth
• Knowing their work matters

Not just promotions or bonuses.

When leaders keep managing individuals instead of cultivating teams, motivation breaks down.

When leaders assume loyalty instead of earning it, engagement evaporates.

The Real Breakdown Is Clarity, Care, and Communication

Gallup’s data is clear on this.

Employees are unclear about expectations.
Unclear about excellence.
Unclear about where the company is going and where they fit.

Leaders often think clarity is delivered once.

It isn’t.

Our own data shows that overall culture health is most strongly influenced by how employees perceive the culture overall. A single-point improvement in culture perception leads to an average 21-point increase in culture health, which then cascades into higher motivation, loyalty, and wellbeing. Small perception shifts create outsized behavioral change.

Clarity has to be repeated.
Shown.
Lived.
Reinforced with stories, visuals, examples, and shared language.

Care works the same way.

Most leaders believe they care.
Employees believe care when they can feel it.

Care isn’t intent.
It’s demonstrated presence, listening, follow-through, and relevance.

Why Engagement Feels So Hard Right Now

Because many leaders are still operating with old language and old assumptions.

Mission and vision statements rarely connect to anyone’s daily life. They never really did.

Purpose does.

Meaning does.

A high-trust, high-clarity environment does.

Our data shows that when employees strongly agree that a senior leader genuinely cares about their development, wellbeing scores increase by about 21 points on average. That increase correlates with lower burnout risk and higher likelihood of retention. Leadership visibility is not symbolic. It is structural.

Leaders don’t lose engagement because they don’t care.
They lose it because they underestimate how much attention and repetition culture actually requires.

The Joy of Work Has Been Lost

Rudyard Kipling once wrote about the joy of work.

That joy has quietly disappeared from many organizations.

Joy doesn’t mean easy.
It means meaningful.

Our data shows that when employees connect their personal sense of purpose to the organization’s purpose, motivation scores increase by roughly 15 points, and discretionary effort rises alongside it. Work stops feeling transactional and starts feeling contributive.

People do their best work when they feel encouraged, trusted, guided, and supported as humans.

“The better people feel at work, the better they work.” — Will Scott

That truth hasn’t changed.
Leadership just stopped prioritizing it.

A Final Word

Employee disengagement isn’t a mystery.
It’s a leadership pattern.

Gallup’s data shows the scale of the problem.
Our data shows the mechanics behind it.

Culture health, the combined measure of clarity, care, values, motivation, and wellbeing, does not move incrementally. When leaders invest in purpose, care, and clarity, scores move 15–25 points at a time. That is why engagement either meaningfully improves or doesn’t move at all.

The organizations that reverse disengagement won’t be the ones with better slogans.
They’ll be the ones willing to lead differently.

Before trying to fix engagement, it helps to understand how your people actually experience your culture today.

The Culture & Team Health Diagnostic gives leaders a clear, data-backed view of what’s working, what’s drifting, and where clarity, care, and leadership attention are breaking down.

Not to judge.
To lead better.