Employee Engagement SOS?
Alarm over Gallup's 31% engagement rate may be overblown
Employee engagement, Gallup tells us, is taking on water — sinking to a 10-year low. A closer look suggests this may just be a course correction.
First, two key points:
Gallup defines employee engagement as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.”
Gallup offers businesses employee-engagement consulting services. Bad news about employee engagement can be good news for consultants.
On January 14, 2025 Gallup posted an article with the headline U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low, leading with…
Employee engagement in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in a decade in 2024, with only 31% of employees engaged. This matches the figure last seen in 2014. The percentage of actively disengaged employees, at 17%, also reflects 2014 levels.
Some workplace experts will decry the fact that only about a third of the workforce is engaged.
But what, if anything, does Gallup’s data really tell us about levels of employees’ job engagement?
Gallup categorizes1 employees as …
Engaged: “Highly involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplace.”
Not Engaged: “Psychologically unattached to their work and company.”
Actively Disengaged: “Resent that their needs are not being met and are acting out their unhappiness.”
In its most recent data, Gallup buckets about 52% of US employees and a whopping 62% of global employees in the murky “Not Engaged” classification.
By calling the vast middle “Not Engaged,” Gallup casts employee engagement as a binary attribute — either you are, or you aren’t. This oversimplifies what many researchers recognize as a fluid and contextual spectrum.
From 2000-2010, the engagement rate ebbed and flowed between 26% and 30%. The 2015-2020 period, with rates peaking at 36%, was the anomaly.
Objective analysts may argue that the steep decline since 2020 — coinciding with workplace disruption linked to the COVID-19 pandemic — reflects regression to the mean, where extreme results naturally stabilize closer to average over time.
Does the Data Make the Cut?
Because Gallup’s data and formulas are closely held secrets (understandable, given the enterprise’s profit motive), we don’t know how exclusive its engagement criteria are. Gallup shares only that it’s a high threshold: “Employee engagement is a much higher bar,” the firm acknowledges, “than merely satisfaction or metrics that combine ‘strongly agree’ and ‘agree’ responses…”¹
As
and David Ballard observed in 2019’s Pseudoscience Won’t Create a Psychologically Healthy Workplace:“There is no employee engagement crisis — employee engagement (whatever it is) is fairly normally distributed, which is exactly what one would expect to find.”
The real story is not that engagement has sunk to new depths, but that employers risk implementing rudderless interventions due to their blind spot for consulting firms’ content marketing and their failure to recognize normal workplace equilibrium.
Take A Few Minutes to Learn About Evidence-Based Practice
As an astute information consumer who’s made it to the end of this article, you may also be interested in Heigh Ho’s latest AI-assisted podcast episode, Understanding Evidence-Based Practice for Employee Wellness Leaders, available on your favorite podcast platform and with slides on YouTube.
See Gallup’s State of the Workforce 2024 report (and updated reports as they become available). It’s a trove of data on global workplace trends, not just engagement but loneliness, mental health, life satisfaction, and management. See Appendices 2 and 3 of the full report for details on Gallup’s engagement survey methodology.
