Why Your Engagement Efforts Are Making Things Worse — And the Three-Part Fix

This one is going to be uncomfortable.

U.S. employee engagement has dropped from 36% in 2020 to 31% today. Globally, it sits at 21% — a decline that matches what happened during COVID-19 lockdowns. The cost? An estimated $438 billion in lost productivity worldwide. (See also: The Four P’s of Engagement.)

Organizations have responded by investing in engagement surveys, wellness programs, team-building events, recognition platforms, and culture initiatives. Billions of dollars. (See also: Burnout Is Not a Character Flaw — It’s a System Output.)

And the numbers are going backward.

At some point, we have to stop asking “how do we improve engagement?” and start asking a harder question: What if the approach itself is the problem?

The Basics Are Crumbling

Gallup’s latest data reveals something that should alarm every leader. The foundational drivers of engagement — the basic conditions that make people want to show up and contribute — are all in decline.

Only 46% of employees feel clear about what’s expected of them. That was 56% in 2020.

Only 39% feel someone at work cares about them as a person. That was 47% in 2020.

Only 30% believe someone encourages their development. That was 36% in 2020.

These aren’t nice-to-haves. These are the basics. Clarity. Care. Development. And we’re losing ground on all three simultaneously.

No amount of engagement programming can compensate for a workforce that doesn’t know what’s expected of them and doesn’t feel anyone cares.

The Inconvenient Truth: It’s the Managers

Gallup’s research is unambiguous: 70% of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager. Not the CEO. Not the culture deck. Not the engagement survey. The direct manager.

But here’s the cascade that nobody wants to talk about. Manager engagement itself has cratered — falling from 30% to 27% in a single year. Younger managers and female managers saw even steeper declines.

You cannot pour from an empty cup. And you definitely cannot pour from an empty cup at organizational scale.

When we ask disengaged, overwhelmed, under-supported managers to drive engagement for their teams, we are running a system designed to fail. Then we blame the managers for the failure we engineered.

What $400,000 in Engagement Spending Actually Bought

An HR director I know did something radical last year. She killed her organization’s $400,000 engagement platform — the surveys, the pulse checks, the gamified recognition app, the quarterly “culture challenges.” All of it. Gone.

Then she took that money and used it to reduce average manager span of control from 14 direct reports to 8.

No new programs. No new initiatives. No new technology. Just fewer people per manager, which meant more time per person, which meant managers could actually manage.

Engagement scores rose 11 points in one year.

She told me: “We spent four years and over a million dollars trying to program our way to engagement. Turns out, we just needed to let managers be managers.”

That story captures everything wrong with the current approach — and everything right about the alternative.

The Three-Part Fix — and Why Sequence Matters

In our consulting work, the organizations that have genuinely reversed engagement declines follow a specific sequence. Not just the right interventions, but the right interventions in the right order. Skip a step or scramble the sequence, and it doesn’t work.

Step 1: Reduce the Manager’s Burden First

This is where most organizations get it backward. They see declining engagement and respond by adding to the manager’s role — new coaching expectations, new check-in requirements, new feedback protocols, new survey response action plans.

They are asking an already overwhelmed person to do more. That is the definition of the problem, not the solution.

Before asking managers to drive engagement, audit what’s on their plate. Map every responsibility, every meeting, every report, every approval workflow. Then have an honest conversation about what can be removed, delegated, automated, or eliminated.

In our work with organizations, we consistently find that 20-30% of what managers spend their time on adds no value to the people they lead, the customers they serve, or the strategy they’re supposed to execute. Administrative overhead. Redundant reporting. Meetings that exist because they’ve always existed.

Remove the non-essential. Give capacity back. You cannot add “engagement driver” to a role that’s already unsustainable. You have to subtract first.

The HR director who cut her engagement platform understood this intuitively. Reducing span of control from 14 to 8 didn’t add a single new expectation. It subtracted the impossible math of trying to meaningfully connect with 14 people while also managing operations, attending meetings, and responding to 200 emails a day.

Step 2: Re-Establish the Three Basics — Clarity, Care, Development

Once managers have capacity, focus on the three things that Gallup’s data shows matter most. Not twelve competencies. Not a leadership model with eight dimensions. Three things.

Clarity: Can this manager clearly articulate what is expected of each team member this month? Not this year. This month. People cannot engage with ambiguity. They need to know what success looks like in concrete, current terms.

Care: Does this manager have at least one conversation per month with each team member that is about the human, not just the task? Not a wellness check-in. Not a scripted “how are you doing?” A genuine conversation where the person feels seen as a person, not a production unit.

Development: Is there a growth conversation happening regularly — not annually during the performance review, but monthly? It doesn’t have to be long. “What’s one thing you want to get better at this month, and how can I help?” That question, asked consistently, changes the relationship between a manager and their team member.

These are not new ideas. They are the oldest ideas in management. And we’ve gotten worse at all three simultaneously because we buried them under programs, platforms, and initiatives that are more visible but less effective.

Step 3: Measure Behaviors, Not Scores

An engagement survey tells you where you are. It does not tell you what to do.

The shift is from measuring the outcome — the engagement score — to measuring the behaviors that produce the outcome. Are managers conducting monthly one-on-ones? Are expectations being clarified at the beginning of each month? Are development conversations happening? Are managers’ spans of control sustainable?

If the behaviors are present, the scores will follow. If you chase the scores without changing the behaviors, you get what we’ve gotten for the past five years — billions in investment and declining numbers.

And One More Thing: Kill the Engagement Theater

If an initiative doesn’t directly change the daily experience of work, it’s noise. Kill it. Redirect the resources to manager development and workload reduction.

If an initiative doesn’t affect what happens between a manager and their team on a Tuesday afternoon, it’s engagement theater. And your employees know it.

A meditation app does not fix an unsustainable workload. A mental health day does not fix a culture where autonomy has been stripped away. A pizza party does not fix a reward system that ignores contribution.

These well-intentioned gestures can actually make the problem worse, because they signal that the organization “cares” while leaving the root causes untouched. Employees aren’t fooled.

This Is Not a Morale Problem. It’s a Design Problem.

We designed organizations where the people most responsible for engagement are the least supported. We gave them unsustainable workloads, stripped away their capacity to connect, and then launched programs aimed at everyone except them. When engagement declined, we blamed the managers for the failure we engineered.

The fix isn’t more engagement spending. It’s better system design. And the sequence matters: reduce the burden first, re-establish the basics second, measure behaviors third.

Fix the manager’s situation, and you fix the manager. Fix the manager, and you fix the team. Fix the team, and you fix the organization.

It’s not complicated. But it does require the courage to stop adding and start subtracting.

What’s your organization doing about manager engagement — the engagement of the people responsible for everyone else’s engagement? Are you adding to their plate, or subtracting from it? I’d genuinely like to hear what’s working and what isn’t.

Sources

• Gallup — U.S. and global employee engagement trends (36% to 31% U.S. decline; 21% global rate; $438 billion productivity cost estimate)
• Gallup — Manager engagement decline (30% to 27% in one year; steeper declines for younger and female managers)
• Gallup — Foundational engagement driver declines (clarity: 56% to 46%; care: 47% to 39%; development: 36% to 30%)
• Gallup — Manager impact on team engagement (70% of variance attributable to the direct manager)

Gordon Klein is the founder of Reflect Excellence, a leadership and organizational performance consulting firm. He serves on the Sterling Council board and contributes to the design of Sterling’s Leadership Development curriculum. He works with organizations across sectors — healthcare, government, education, and business — on the systemic challenges that make leadership harder than it needs to be. Connect with him to continue the conversation. (See also: What If the System Is the Problem?.)